Author: samanthawaite88

It occurred to us the other day: Taboo Education is a death literacy channel with well over 200 long-form videos under our belt, and yet we haven’t officially dived into one of the most foundational psychological frameworks surrounding death anxiety. Today, we are correcting that. Welcome to Terror Management Theory (TMT)—the psychological framework arguing that death anxiety is the hidden engine driving almost all of human behavior, whether we are brave enough to admit it or not.

You are going to die. You already knew that. But here is the part your brain aggressively resists: that knowledge is so deeply threatening that your entire personality, your political views, your religion, your tribe, and your need to feel special are largely elaborate defense mechanisms constructed to keep you from confronting your own mortality.

Developed in the 1980s by researchers Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski—building on Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death—Terror Management Theory argues that human civilization is, at its core, one long collective attempt to pretend we aren’t animals destined to rot in the ground.

What Is “Mortality Salience” and Why Does It Matter?

Mortality salience is simply the psychological term for how consciously aware you are of your own death at any given moment. When mortality salience is high—when death feels immediate or real—something fascinating happens in the human brain. You don’t automatically become wiser, kinder, or more present. Instead, you get defensive.

Researchers have proven this in hundreds of experiments using a method that is almost embarrassingly simple: they ask participants to write a short paragraph about what it feels like to think about their own death, and then observe their behavior immediately afterward.

The results are consistently disturbing:

• People become significantly harsher in their judgments of others.
• They exhibit greater hostility toward anyone with differing worldviews.
• They cling tighter to their group, nation, or cultural identity.
• They show a stronger impulse to punish social rule-breakers and reward those who validate their own beliefs.

In one landmark study, judges were asked to set hypothetical bail for a minor offense. Half of the judges were asked to complete a brief death-writing exercise first. The control group set average bail at $50. The judges reminded of their mortality set bail at $455—nine times harsher—for the exact same case, purely because their death anxiety had been quietly triggered.

The Two Shields We Use to Keep Existential Panic at Bay

According to TMT, human beings manage existential dread using two primary psychological mechanisms:

1. Symbolic Immortality (A Meaningful Worldview)

Every culture in history has built belief systems that grant life meaning beyond an individual’s lifespan. Religion is the classic example, offering literal immortality through an afterlife. But secular worldviews do the exact same job: believing your nation matters, that your children carry your legacy, or that your life’s work will outlast you. Becker called this symbolic immortality. You cannot live forever, but your legacy, group, or ideas can—and that takes the sharp edge off existential panic.

2. Self-Esteem (Feeling Worthy in a Meaningful World)

In TMT, self-esteem isn’t just “feeling good about yourself.” It is the felt sense that you are a valuable contributor to a meaningful universe. When you feel like you matter, death feels slightly less terrifying. When you feel insignificant, mortality becomes unbearable because there is no symbolic immortality to rely on. This explains why people who feel powerless often compensate so aggressively through road rage, rigid nationalism, or a desperate need to always be right.

Clashing Immortality Projects: Why Good People Do Terrible Things

This is where Becker’s theory turns truly dark. When two groups hold fundamentally different worldviews, they are not merely having a disagreement—they are threatening each other’s defense systems against death anxiety. If your worldview says life means one thing, and mine says the complete opposite, one of us is relying on a lie. Your nervous system perceives that ideological difference as an existential threat.

This explains the horrifying mechanics of war and historical atrocities. When people die for an ideological cause, their group cannot psychologically afford to let those deaths feel pointless. The sacrifice must be validated by continuing the fight, creating a tragic cycle where more people die to prove that previous deaths meant something.

TMT reveals that atrocities are rarely committed by cartoonish monsters; they are carried out by ordinary human beings who have surrendered their moral agency to an “immortality project” because they desperately need their lives—and deaths—to matter.

Cults, Extremism, and the Weaponization of Unacknowledged Fear

Extremist groups and cults are, at their core, master salespeople of symbolic immortality. They target individuals whose meaning-making frameworks have collapsed, offering absolute certainty, radical belonging, and a grand cosmic narrative where individual death becomes glorious rather than terrifying.

This is precisely why death literacy is a vital societal defense mechanism:

• Nuance demands effort: Nuance acknowledges that life is complex and death is real. Extremist groups sell absolute certainty.
• Death literacy builds psychological immunity: A person comfortable sitting with mortality is vastly harder to radicalize because they do not carry unacknowledged existential terror waiting to be weaponized by loud, confident leaders.
• Resilience over reaction: True death literacy isn’t just soft comfort; it is structural protection against psychological manipulation.

Why “Just Doing a Grief Workshop” Isn’t Good Enough

For decades, standard institutional responses treat death purely as a crisis management problem: hand out a brochure when someone is actively dying or grieving, tick the box, and move on. But Terror Management Theory shows us that everyone—from young children asking honest questions to middle-aged adults quietly panicking—has an active relationship with mortality every single day.

When society refuses to give people open, honest frameworks for death early in life, they cope by repressing the anxiety, leading to rigidity, hostility, and fear. Waiting until the end of life to discuss mortality is like placing an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff. Taboo Education exists to build capacity before the cliff.

Death literacy isn’t about pretending death is comfortable—it’s about building the psychological strength to look at it directly, alongside others, long before the crisis arrives. Face the discomfort, protect your mind, and go talk death.

There is a popular assumption that death education is a niche package. Something you pull off the shelf only when someone is actively dying, when you’ve just lost a loved one, or when you’re filling out the paperwork that confirms you do, in fact, have an estate. A will. A power of attorney. Maybe a few tidy thoughts on whether you’d prefer burial or cremation.

Very practical. Very structured. Very much not the point.

The clinical data tells a completely different story. As it turns out, your relationship with mortality is quietly running the show for almost every single area of your life, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. The only question is whether you are managing it consciously, or whether it is managing you from the shadows.

When I tell people I work in death literacy, everyone assumes I only talk about wills, funerals, and grief. But those elements are a tiny fraction of what death awareness actually changes.

This deep dive stems from a distinct professional frustration. The modern death-positive movement has become hyper-focused on body disposal methods, green burial aesthetics, and the immediate mechanics of end-of-life care. While those initiatives are deeply necessary, they create an absurd disconnect: we expect individuals to seamlessly navigate end-of-life crises when they haven’t spent a single day of their active lives developing a relationship with mortality.

Let’s take a completely unnecessary tour through what death literacy actually dictates across an entire lifespan.

1. Death Anxiety Is a Mental Health Issue Wearing a Trench Coat

Before unpacking demographic anomalies, we must establish a core psychological truth. A definitive 2024 meta-analysis led by Rachel Menzies and colleagues at the University of Sydney (published in Clinical Psychology Review) analyzed data from 104 papers representing over 24,000 participants. They confirmed a profound, undeniable correlation between unmitigated death anxiety and overall mental health symptoms.

The researchers described death anxiety as transdiagnostic. This means it is an existential undercurrent that feeds an array of clinical issues rather than neatly belonging to any single condition. Long-term, unprocessed death anxiety is a core driving engine behind:

• Health Anxiety & Panic Disorder: A hyper-vigilance to bodily changes misread as immediate fatal threats.
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): Specifically where cleaning, contamination fears, and counting rituals function as an unconscious defense against decay and physical harm.
• General Anxiety & Depression: An underlying dread regarding the limitations of time and lack of control.

Approximately one in five Australians experiences a mental health condition in any given year. A massive, unaddressed portion of that psychological burden is simply death anxiety with nowhere to go—ignored by a clinical landscape that rarely trains practitioners to look for it.

2. Teenagers Aren’t Invincible—They Think They’re Already Dead

The conventional cultural script claims that teenagers engage in reckless behavior because they feel completely invincible. They supposedly believe they will live forever. The empirical evidence shows that the exact opposite is true.

Pioneering research by Baruch Fischhoff and colleagues revealed that 15- and 16-year-olds wildly overestimated their immediate probability of dying within the year at approximately 19%, and their chance of dying before exiting their teens at 20%. These figures are mathematically catastrophic compared to actual, nominal adolescent mortality rates.

This psychological state is known as fatalism—the implicit belief that a short life is inevitable. Longitudinal data from the massive Add Health cohort (tracking over 20,000 adolescents) established that teenagers who perceived a 50-50 or lower chance of living to age 35 were drastically more likely in young adulthood to:

• Suffer from chronic suicidal ideation and attempt suicide.
• Engage in heavy, self-destructive substance abuse.
• Completely discard the motivation to delay gratification for future benefits.

If a young person unconsciously believes they won’t be around to inherit a future, the evolutionary case for protecting that future completely collapses. Death literacy for adolescents is not a soft exercise in processing grief; it is a vital identity intervention. By establishing an honest, non-panicked relationship with reality, programs like the evaluated “Beyond the Wall” curriculum have proven to rapidly lower high-risk behavior by giving teens a future-oriented framework worth investing in.

3. The 25 to 55 Bracket: The Most Anxious Demographics Alive

Counterintuitively, older populations consistently demonstrate the lowest baseline levels of death anxiety. The peak of existential terror belongs almost exclusively to middle adulthood—the 25 to 55 demographic. This is the over-extended, stressed-out engine room of society carrying the mortgages, the career ladders, the children, and the aging parents.

The Sandwich Generation & Unnamed Grief

Data from the National Institutes of Health indicates that nearly two-thirds of sandwich-generation caregivers experience intense, sustained emotional strain. What is rarely named by professionals is that this strain is predominantly anticipatory grief. Watching a parent slowly decline through dementia or physical failure is a prolonged, ambiguous loss that occurs over years.

Because our culture lacks existential language, this grief is rarely processed. Instead, it expresses itself as erratic irritability, burnout, and systemic family friction. Death literacy provides a definitive diagnostic name for this state. It shifts a caregiver from a state of chaotic emotional drowning to structured, conscious treading water.

The Midlife Crisis Reworked

In middle adulthood, an individual’s relationship with time undergoes a profound structural shift. Instead of unconsciously counting years *since birth*, the mind begins calculating time *until death*.

When this reality hits a psychological system completely devoid of death literacy, the results are predictably catastrophic. The classic, stereotypical midlife crisis—the impulsive affair, the erratic financial purchases, the sudden identity pivots—is nothing more than a desperate, unmediated response to sudden mortality salience.

Alternatively, the empirical data shows that conscious, deliberate contemplation of one’s finitude radically increases intrinsic goal orientation, slashes superficial selfishness, and accelerates authentic identity integration. It turns an identity breakdown into a genuine psychological evolution.

4. The Immortality Projects: Career, Consumerism, and Media

When death anxiety remains unconscious, it forces individuals to build what Ernest Becker defined as “immortality projects”—subconscious systems designed to bypass the reality of physical death by achieving symbolic significance.

• The Parent Trap: Parents lacking death literacy routinely turn their children into immortality vehicles. They over-invest in their children’s precise achievements and choices because they cannot sit with their own finitude. A death-literate parent can separate their own existential security from their child’s life, allowing them to parent the actual human being in front of them.
• Exploitative Materialism: Published consumer research by Arndt & Solomon confirms that sudden, subtle reminders of death dramatically spike materialistic aspirations and impulsive buying intentions. When people are existentially insecure, they cling desperately to physical possessions and wealth as a symbolic psychological buffer.
• The Political Pipeline: Extensive meta-analyses spanning thousands of global participants prove that raw mortality salience instinctively drives humans toward aggressive in-group favoritism, intense hostility toward out-groups, and a sudden craving for charismatic, authoritarian leaders who promise absolute protection.

The endless cycle of fear-mongering media and tribalist politics works precisely because your unaddressed death anxiety is an incredibly lucrative fishing pond. A death-literate individual is fundamentally un-hookable. They can sit comfortably with existential discomfort without needing to purchase a product or find a political scapegoat to feel safe.

5. Early Retirement: The Collapse of the Primary Shield

Here is a clinical reality that is completely excluded from financial retirement planning conversations: a staggering 41% of retirees experience moderate to severe identity disruption within the very first year of leaving the workforce.

For forty years, a career functions as an individual’s primary immortality project—the ultimate boilerplate answer to whether their existence matters. The second that framework is removed, the existential questions do not retire; they simply stop being answered.

A person entering retirement without strong death literacy is instantly exposed to a concentrated wave of mortality salience as peers begin to fall ill. Without a pre-built internal framework of meaning unrelated to institutional productivity, post-retirement depression frequently sets in as an anticipation of ultimate non-existence.

Purpose is not a soft psychological luxury; it is highly physiological. Definitive longitudinal data directly links a firm, conscious sense of existential purpose in early retirement with significantly lower mortality risks, vastly improved sleep architecture, and sharply reduced clinical depression rates over the subsequent decades. Purpose dictates whether your biology functions.

The Choice Is Singular

We have somehow collectively agreed to a bizarre societal framework where one of the most powerful determinants of mental health, parenting dynamics, consumer vulnerability, and political radicalization is treated as a niche specialty to be ignored until an absolute crisis occurs.

Unconscious death anxiety leaves you entirely exposed to systemic manipulation, chronic treading water, and reactive life choices. Conscious, processed death literacy creates an unshakeable groundedness, deep generational legacy motivation, and true personal autonomy.

It is not a niche conversation for the end of life. It is the foundational landscape of living well.

Go talk death.

For our regular viewers, this video is going to be a departure from our usual death-related content. But as you will have noticed, critical thinking is something we strongly advocate on this channel. And that is exactly what this video is about.

It is for everyone who has ever asked themselves, “Does the US even have an education system? Is it optional?” It is for everyone who sees the brain rot coming out of the US day after day and genuinely wondering why.

It is for everyone asking how a nation of 335 million people ended up with the biggest village idiot on the planet as president. Since that brain rot is now affecting our kids and that village idiot is actively affecting our lives, many of us outside the US are demanding an explanation.

I too wanted an answer to these questions, and since I love to research anything and everything, this became the rabbit hole that I went down over the past few months. What I found is too important not to share, and it’s a 250-year-old story. The first half of this video explains to the international community how America got itself into this mess. And the second half explains to Americans why the international community is done being diplomatic about how we feel about it.

Buckle up, it’s going to be a long, bumpy ride.

What is Critical Thinking and Why Does it Matter?

Since that is what this video is essentially about, let’s define it. Critical thinking is not about being clever or contrarian or difficult. It is the ability to evaluate a claim before accepting it.

To ask where that information comes from, who benefits from you believing in it, whether that evidence actually supports the conclusion, and whether you would accept the same argument if it came from the other side. It is, at its core, the ability to change your mind when the evidence demands it.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

When a population lacks critical thinking skills, the consequences are not abstract. People cannot identify when they are being lied to. They cannot distinguish between a credible source and a fabricated one. They make medical, financial, and political decisions based on what feels true rather than what is demonstrably true.

They are easy to manipulate, easy to sell to, easy to frighten, and easy to turn against each other. They vote against their own interests. They trust the people who are harming them. They distrust the people who are trying to help them. And they can be convinced that all of the above is actually freedom.

Every single thing this video covers—the school system, the media, the exported dysfunction, the slide towards authoritarianism—is what happens without this skill as part of your culture. Keep that in mind as we go forward.

One more thing before we go further because someone will make the comment if we don’t bring it up. This video is not arguing that Americans are stupid.

335 million people have the same range of intelligence as any other population on Earth. The same distribution of IQ, the same capacity for brilliance, the same capacity for analytical thought. Some of the most rigorous thinkers, scientists, journalists, and critics in the world are American.

What this video is arguing is that a system was deliberately built to prevent a very, very large portion of the population from developing and using the skills of critical thinking, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence. And that is a very different claim. And if you genuinely think all Americans are stupid, you are clearly deficient in critical thinking skills yourself. So you might not want to throw stones.

A Nation Founded on Anti-Intellectualism

Let’s start with a statement that sounds provocative but is on examination simply accurate. The United States of America is the only known country in the world throughout history that was deliberately, structurally, ideologically from the ground up founded on anti-intellectualism.

Not a country that tried to revoke knowledge. A country that had anti-intellectualism written into its foundational cultural DNA before the ink on its constitution was dry.

That is genuinely batshit crazy, but it does answer a lot of questions.

Anti-intellectualism, if you want a formal definition, is a hostility towards or distrust of intellectuals, intellectual pursuits, and expertise. The idea that knowledge is suspicious. That educated people are probably up to something. That gut feeling and common sense are more trustworthy than evidence and analysis. That the person who has spent 30 years studying a subject has less credibility than the person who read about it on their phone on Tuesday.

Most countries have pockets of anti-intellectualism. It exists everywhere to some degree. What makes America categorically different is that anti-intellectualism was not a reaction to its founding institutions. It was part of them. It was present at its creation and it was useful to the people doing the creating.

The dominant story America tells itself is the story of the self-made man. The rugged individualist who didn’t need schooling, didn’t need experts, didn’t need anyone’s help, just grit, faith, and common sense. This archetype goes back to the very earliest European settlers, many of whom were religious communities that left Europe specifically because they found it too tolerant, enlightened, and intellectually open.

They were not fleeing oppression so they could build a society of free inquiry. They were fleeing because they wanted to build a society where the truth was already settled by God, by scripture, by community elders, and it was not up for debate.

Now, yes, the founding fathers, some of them were genuinely brilliant. Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton—educated, widely read, deeply influenced by European enlightenment thought. But here’s what the mythology leaves out:

Those men were the elite, wealthy, traveled, multilingual, and they were mistrusted for it almost immediately by large portions of the population they were supposedly leading.

The first great organized expression of anti-intellectualism as a political force arrived with the rise of populist democracy in the early 19th century. The idea that any ordinary man was just as qualified to govern as a trained statesman. That book learning was a form of corruption. That educated people were probably up to something.

Andrew Jackson, America’s seventh president, built his entire political identity on contempt for educated elites. He was celebrated for it. He is still on the $20 note.

Wow. That is fucked up. Jesus Christ.

Okay, so the soil was prepared early. What grew in it over the next two centuries was a culture where intelligence became something you apologized for, expertise became something you treated with suspicion, and common sense came to mean whatever you already believed before you heard the evidence.

A population that distrusts expertise is a population that won’t question the factory owner, the landlord, the preacher, or the politician. It is in the most literal sense easier to manage.

Every single thing we are about to cover in this video, the school system, the media, the gun debate, the military worship, the exported dysfunction, all of it flows directly from this founding fact. Once you understand that anti-intellectualism is not a flaw of the American experiment, but a feature of it, the rest stops being confusing really quickly.

The School System: How to Engineer a Population That Cannot Think Critically

The American school system does not accidentally fail to teach critical thinking. It was structurally designed that way through a series of deliberate policy decisions spanning two centuries to produce something other than critical thinkers.

What it was designed to produce changes slightly depending on era, but the output has been remarkably consistent: Compliant, testable, manageable people who know how to follow instructions, but are not particularly equipped to question them.

That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a paper trail. So, let’s go through it.

The Prussian System (Mid-1800s)

In the mid-19th century, American education reformers, most prominently Horace Mann, traveled to Prussia and came back enormously impressed by what they found. The Prussian system was efficient, standardized, and produced highly disciplined graduates. American industrialists and politicians adopted it enthusiastically.

What they did not advertise was what the Prussian system was actually designed to do. Not to produce curious, independent thinkers, but obedient soldiers and compliant factory workers.

Children sat en masse, faced forward, memorized what the teacher said, and did not question. They received, retained, and repeated. The teacher was the authority, and the authority was never to be questioned.

This model suited American industrialists perfectly. The country was industrializing rapidly. It needed workers who would show up, follow instructions, operate machinery safely, and did not organize. It did not need workers who asked why.

The Prussian system delivered exactly what was required, and it became the foundational architecture of the American public education system. Much of it remains intact today.

Let that sink in. The model that still shapes how millions of American children are educated was imported from 19th-century Prussia specifically because it was good at producing people who follow orders. That’s it.

*P.S. The Nazis loved that system when they inherited it.*

IQ Testing and the Eugenics Agenda (1917 to the 1930s)

During the First World War, the US Army developed mass intelligence testing to sort recruits, and afterwards psychologists led by Lewis Terman at Stanford adopted those tests to use in schools.

What the history books tend to gloss over is that the IQ testing movement was explicitly and openly linked to eugenics. The point was not to identify who needed more support. It was to sort the population to identify who was worth educating and who was not.

The tests were designed by white upper class academics saturated with cultural assumptions that made them almost impossible to perform well on if you were poor, immigrant, or Black. And the results were used to track children as young as eight into academic or vocational streams that they almost never left.

By the 1930s, America had built a school system that formally sorted children by race and class, called it meritocracy, and ensured that the children who needed the analytical education the most were precisely the ones least likely to receive it.

The eugenics movement was eventually discredited. The world saw where it led Nazi Germany. But the tracking system survived. Ability groupings remain widespread in American schools. The populations in lower tracks remain disproportionately poor and non-white. The mechanisms changed but the outcome did not.

The Red Scare: Critical Thinking as Communism (1950s)

In the 1950s, a new threat to critical thinking arrived from a rather unexpected direction. Anti-communism.

The McCarthy era produced a cultural climate in which teaching children to question authority, examine evidence from multiple perspectives, or consider ideas that challenged the status quo was treated as potentially subversive, potentially un-American, potentially communist.

School curricula was scrutinized for anything that looked like it might produce a child who asked inconvenient questions. Progressive education which emphasized inquiry, debate or independent thinking was attacked as a vehicle of communist indoctrination.

Teachers were investigated, textbooks were changed. The message delivered clearly and consistently was that the proper role of education was to transmit American values, not interrogate them.

What the fuck was wrong with these people?

The long-term effect of this period on American education is difficult to overstate. It created a cultural norm still present today in which teaching children to think critically about their own country, its history, and its institutions is treated as an act of disloyalty rather than an act of education. This is the direct ancestor of the current battles over what can and cannot be taught in American classrooms.

No Child Left Behind (2001)

Fast forward to 2001. George W. Bush signs the No Child Left Behind Act, the most significant federal intervention in American education in decades.

The stated goal was admirable. Close the achievement gap. Hold schools accountable. Ensure every child reached a basic proficiency in reading and maths.

The mechanism was standardized testing. Schools were required to test students annually and those that failed to meet the benchmarks faced reduced funding, restructuring or closure with teacher performance, school performance and funding all contingent on the same scores.

The result was entirely predictable to anyone who thought about the incentive structure for more than like 30 seconds. Schools stopped teaching what was not tested.

Critical thinking is not easily tested on a standardized exam. Neither is creativity, civic reasoning, ethical analysis, media literacy, philosophical inquiry, or the ability to construct and evaluate an argument. Art, music, and drama subjects that develop lateral thinking and imaginative capacity were cut to make room for test preparation.

Schools in poor areas already under-resourced and under pressure became almost entirely focused on drilling students for the specific questions that they would face on the specific test that determined whether the school survived.

No Child Left Behind did not close the achievement gap. What it did do comprehensively and measurably was to narrow the curriculum, reward repetition and memorization, punish open-ended inquiry, and produce a generation of students who were very good at answering preset questions and very poorly equipped to ask new ones.

It was education restructured around compliance and measurement, which is, if you’ve been paying attention, exactly what the Prussian system was designed to do 150 years earlier.

The law was eventually replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, but the standardized testing culture it embedded remains. The damage to curriculum breadth, to teacher autonomy, to the place of critical thinking in American classrooms was not undone by changing the legislation. You cannot cut a decade of analytical education from a generation and fix it with a new bill.

And for Australians who are about to jump in the comments, yes, we have NAPLAN and yes, it is standardized testing, but it is administered across only four years of schooling, not 12. The stakes are significantly lower. It does not get teachers fired. It does not get entire schools shut down by a school board. And it has never resulted in schools spending an entire decade drilling children on test answers at the expense of everything else. It is not the same thing. It is not even close to the same thing.

The Structural Result

The single most important structural fact about the American education today is this. There is no national curriculum. Education is controlled at the local level by elected school boards across roughly 13,000 school districts.

What a child learns depends almost entirely on where they were born.

A child in Texas may be taught that the Civil War was primarily about states rights. A child in Massachusetts may be taught it was about slavery. And when they grow up and disagree, they are not being irrational. They were trained to disagree. It was built in.

School funding is tied to local property taxes. Meaning schools in wealthy areas are extraordinarily well-resourced and schools in poorer areas are not. And the children in most need of a decent external education are the ones the system is least likely to provide it to.

The United States spends more per student than almost any other country on Earth, but it consistently ranks in the middle of the pack on international assessments of actual student understanding. The money is there, the outcomes really aren’t.

And when you understand the history we have just covered—the anti-intellectualism, the Prussian compliance model, the eugenics tracking system, the anti-communist suppression of inquiry, the no child left behind testing regime—that gap stops being a mystery. It becomes the entirely predictable result of a system that was never at any point of its history primarily designed to produce critical thinking. It was designed to produce people who would follow instructions. And on that matter, it has been extraordinarily successful.

Adulthood: The Machinery Follows You

You leave school, the machinery follows you. You graduate. You know the pledge of allegiance by heart, but you have almost no critical thinking skills to ask why that is the case. You are now an adult. The indoctrination infrastructure of your school years is behind you. Surely now you can think for yourself.

Nope. The ritual continues. It just gets bigger.

The pledge of allegiance that you did every morning, every single morning. Well, what replaces that is something more ambient and more powerful. A total saturation of national symbolism in everyday civilian life.

The flag is everywhere. On porches, on bumper stickers, on clothing, on shop windows, outside car dealerships. The national anthem plays before every sporting event from NFL games to minor league baseball to high school athletics on a Tuesday night. Military flyovers at stadiums, veteran tributes on every occasion. Thank you for your service that is said like, “Bless you” after someone sneezes.

The conditioning continues and you don’t have the skills to question it.

That’s not a mistake. The function is identical to the pledge. It is a daily prompt many times a day often in many different contexts to feel something about your country before you think anything about it. Emotion precedes analysis. Loyalty is assumed. Questioning is socially costly.

The childhood ritual of compulsory patriotism becomes the adult environment of ambient patriotism. And the effect on critical thinking is the same. It makes certain questions feel like personal attacks before they’ve even been asked.

You Participate or You Pay

But these rituals are not merely ambient. They are enforced. Participation is technically voluntary, but refusal is punished. And that distinction between technically voluntary and functionally compelled is exactly how authoritarian cultures operate inside a democratic framework.

Consider this. There is a famous photograph from 1936. A ship launched in Hamburg. Hundreds of people giving the Nazi salute. And in the middle of that crowd is one man standing with his arms crossed instead. His name is believed to be August Landmesser. He refused the ritual and he was later identified, convicted, and eventually killed in a penal battalion.

In 2016, Colin Kaepernick, an NFL player, knelt during the national anthem at a game to protest police brutality against black Americans. He didn’t burn anything. He did not shout. He knelt quietly during a song.

The response was career ending. He was called a traitor. Death threats followed. Every NFL team declined to sign him despite his obvious ability. The president of the United States called him a son of a bitch at a political rally to cheering crowds.

Now, America is not Nazi Germany. That’s not the argument. The argument is this. Compelled loyalty rituals, and the punishment of those who refuse them are a structural feature of authoritarian culture, regardless of which flag they are performed under.

Such a small stepping out of line results with such proportionate punishment. Landmesser was destroyed by the state. Kaepernick was destroyed by the market, the League and the political establishment. Different mechanisms, identical message.

You participate or you pay. And when a ritual makes you a traitor rather than the dissenter, the ritual is no longer a symbol. The country where symbols cannot be questioned has confused loyalty with thought and made them enemies.

The Entertainment Complex: America is Always the Hero

Hollywood is not a neutral storytelling machine. It is the most powerful cultural export in human history. And for decades, it has operated under a consistent set of assumptions.

America is fundamentally good. American foreign policy, however messy, is ultimately motivated by the right values. American soldiers are noble. American institutions are in the end trustworthy. The villain is foreign or domestic and unusual. Never systemic, never the country itself.

This is not an accident. The Pentagon’s entertainment liaison office has co-produced hundreds of films and television series in exchange for access to equipment and locations with script approval as a condition. Movies that portray the US military critically do not get the aircraft carriers. Movies that portray it heroically do.

The result is a cinematic landscape that has spent 70 years telling Americans and the rest of the world a particular story about who Americans are and what their country stands for. When you have absorbed that story since childhood across thousands of hours of film and television, it becomes the emotional baseline against all the other information it’s measured. Facts that fit the story feel true. Facts that are contradicting feel like propaganda.

This is not a conscious process, as it is what happens when entertainment is used at scale over time to shape a culture’s understanding of itself.

Social Media: An American Problem Exported Globally

Before we talk about what social media has done to a population, let’s be clear about what it is. Social media was created by American tech giants. It was allowed to grow without restriction by the American government who chose repeatedly and deliberately not to regulate it. The largest English-speaking user base is the American population.

The algorithms that determine what billions of people around the world see every day were built in California, optimized by American engagement patterns and reflect the American cultural assumptions about what content should be amplified and what should be suppressed. This is not a neutral global utility. It is an American product shaped by American political choices run on American values or more accurately on the absence of them.

Information Overload as a Suppressor of Critical Thinking

Here’s a mechanism that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. In an environment of information abundance, hundreds of cable channels, millions of websites, social media feeds that never end, the instinctive assumption is that more information produces better informed citizens. But the opposite is closer to true.

When you are bombarded with more information than you can possibly process from more sources than you can possibly evaluate, the cognitively rational response is to outsource your judgment. You cannot verify everything. You cannot assess all the sources. So you fall back on a shortcut. You trust the sources that your tribe trusts. You distrust the sources that your tribe distrusts.

Information overload does not produce skepticism. That produces surrender of individual judgment to collective tribal authority. This is why the explosion of available information in the internet age has not produced a more informed American public. It has produced a more confidently misinformed one.

The volume of competing claims is itself a suppressor of critical thinking because critical thinking requires time, cognitive resources, and a framework for evaluation that most Americans were never given. It is the absence of that framework. More information just means more noise. And more noise means more to retreat from to whatever your team says is right.

Which is why a Fox News viewer is less accurately informed on facts than someone who watches no news at all. Let that sink in.

The Defunding of Civic and Adult Education

Let us say generously that someone makes it through the American school system with their curiosity intact. Somehow they are now an adult and they want to learn. They want to develop the analytical skills that they were not given in school. What infrastructure exists for them? Less than there used to be unfortunately and far less than comparable countries.

Public library funding has been cut in real terms across most of the country over the past three decades. Community college, the primary route to affordable further education for working adults, has been defunded in most states with costs shifted to students. Adult literacy and continuing education programs have been cut. Civic education programs which once existed to give adults the tools to participate meaningfully in democratic life have largely disappeared.

The message delivered by this defunding is not subtle. The infrastructure that might allow an American adult to compensate for the poor school education to develop critical thinking after the fact to become a more informed citizen has been systematically dismantled. At the same time that the information environment has become more complex and more manipulative.

Epistemic Tribalism: The End State

All of the above produces reliably and predictably a condition that researchers call epistemic tribalism. Your tribe determines what is true. Evidence that supports your tribe’s position is real, credible, and important. Evidence that challenges that is fake, biased, politically motivated, or an attack on you personally.

The source of the information matters more than the content. The team that produces it matters more than what is actually accurate.

This is not stupidity necessarily, but an entirely rational adaptation of the mind that was never given the tools to evaluate evidence independently, has been trained since childhood to feel loyalty before thinking critically, and is now drowning in more information than it could possibly ever handle in an environment optimized to exploit tribal instincts.

Given those conditions, epistemic tribalism is not a failure of intelligence, a survival strategy.

The big problem though is that democracy cannot function on epistemic tribalism. A democracy requires citizens who can at minimum evaluate the basic factual claims, recognize when they are being misled, and update their positions to response to evidence. Epistemic tribalism makes all three of those things not just unlikely, but actively threatening to the individual’s sense of identity and community belonging.

Changing your mind in a tribally divided information environment means betraying your team. And most people, given the choice between truth and belonging, will choose belonging every time. Because belonging kept humans alive for hundreds of thousands of years before critical thinking was even a concept.

Who Benefits and Why There’s No Conspiracy Required?

At this point, a reasonable person asks, “Who actually wants this? Who benefits from a population of adults that cannot think critically?” And the honest answer is that the beneficiaries are many, which makes it so much more durable.

• Large tech companies profit from engagement over accuracy. Outrage keeps people on the platform, and it doesn’t matter to the algorithm whether the outrage is justified or not.
• Political parties on both sides benefit from loyal, unquestioning bases rather than genuinely independent voters who might defect on any given issue.
• Corporations benefit from consumers who do not scrutinize their products, their labor practices, or their environmental record.
• Politicians do better when fewer people vote, and the ones who do are angry and loyal.
• Wealthy donors benefit from a tax and regulatory environment that a critical thinking majority would never have voted for.

Oh yeah, and one more. Who else benefits the church?

Religious organizations are among the most direct and least discussed beneficiaries of a population that was never taught to examine claims critically. Prosperity gospel is the clearest example. God rewards faith with wealth. Your poverty is a spiritual failing. Your pastor’s private jet is evidence of divine favor.

This collapses under 30 seconds of scrutiny. It contradicts the foundational text it claims to represent and is transparently self-serving for the person asking for the money. It survives only because critical thinking was never taught to the population at large.

And then there is the individual level. In a population with strong critical thinking, a charismatic person who wants wealth and power has to compete in arenas where their claims get tested. In a population without it, pastoral ministry is one of the most efficient routes available.

No qualifications required. Tax-free income. A congregation preconditioned to follow authority and socially punish anyone who questions the leadership. To question the pastor is to question God. It is a near-perfect environment for narcissistic exploitation.

The flock was prepared by the school system. The shepherd arrived and took advantage of it. This isn’t an attack on people with faith. You do not need a naive population to have a healthy religious community, but you do need one to run a televangelical empire.

The Full Picture

Technology companies, political parties, corporations, incumbent politicians, wealthy donors, predatory financial institutions, religious empires. None of them conspired together. All of them benefit from the same outcome.

The school system was not designed by conspiracy. It was shaped by industrialists, eugenicists, cold war politicians, and standardized testing lobbyists, each pursuing their own agenda.

The adult information environment was not designed by conspiracy. It was shaped by cable news executives, social media engineers, and political operatives, each pursuing their own agenda.

The conspiracy theory version of this story is actually less frightening than the truth. The truth is that you do not need a conspiracy when you have aligned incentives. The machine runs itself.

What This Has Done to the American People and Why They Should Be Livid

This was done to you and you deserve to be furious about it. The American people are not the villains in this story. They are the victims. And the people who did this to them did it deliberately for profit over generations.

The Theft of Intellectual Competence

Tens of millions of Americans who are perfectly capable of sophisticated thought were taught that thinking is not for them. That gut feeling is just as valid as expertise. That the person with the library card is the suspicious one. That is not freedom. That is a con that takes your own intelligence and turns it against you. Working-class Americans were told that incuriosity was their identity. The people who told them that got very, very rich.

The Health Cost

The US has the worst health outcomes of any wealthy nation while paying more for health care than anywhere else on Earth. A population taught to distrust medical expertise delays treatment, refuses vaccines, follows misinformation, and dies earlier than it should because it was deliberately taught to distrust the people who could have helped it. Every comparable country has universal health care, and every comparable country has better outcomes. That is not a coincidence.

The Financial Cost

Payday lenders, for-profit colleges, predatory mortgages, multi-level marketing. These industries thrive on America specifically because critical thinking was withheld from their people they target. Young Americans were handed decades of debt for degrees whose value has already collapsed by institutions that knew this and said nothing.

The Political Cost

Americans vote against their own interests with a consistency that baffles the rest of the world because the emotional framing was always more powerful than the policy analysis that they were never taught to do. The cruelest part is that the people most shaped by that conditioning are usually the ones defending it the hardest because admitting that was done to them means admitting that the identity they built and the community they found was constructed by people who never had their interests at heart.

The Social Cost

When truth is determined by what team you’re on, the fracturing moves into families, friendships, and communities until the social fabric tears completely. Americans report higher rates of loneliness than citizens in comparable countries. Americans did not choose to hate each other. They were put in conditions designed by people who found their divisions profitable.

The rage is legitimate. It is the correct response to what has been done, but it is aimed with the extraordinary precision by people who benefit from its misdirection at immigrants, academics, journalists, and other tribes rather than the architects of conditioning producing it.

If you are American watching this and you are angry, you should be. You were robbed and the people who robbed you have been very careful to make sure you send that anger somewhere else.

Consequences and Authoritarianism: Where it Lands

Everything in this video has a logical end point. And we’re at it. Democracy hollows out before it falls. The institutions remain. The elections continue. The flag still flies, but the substance drains away when the population no longer has the tools to protect it from someone who wanted to exploit it.

Authoritarianism arrives as a series of individually survivable moments. A norm broken here, an institution undermined here. Each step is absorbed, and each step makes the next one easier. And a population that was never taught to recognize the pattern will dismiss warnings as partisan hysteria until it’s too late.

Since taking office, Trump has attacked the independence of the judiciary, defunded and dismantled federal agencies, purged the civil service of anyone not personally loyal to him, including the heads of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the senior military leadership, you know, the thing that you’re so proud of and maybe the only way to get you out of this mess, the attorney general, the senior justice department officials, inspector generals across multiple departments, and the list goes on declared the press the enemy of the people and used the power of executive to punish political opponents and reward allies.

He has withdrawn from international institutions, torn up alliances and openly express admiration for authoritarian leaders while treating democratic ones as contempt. That is not normal disagreement. This is the systematic removal of the checks and balances that prevent one person from having unchecked power. And the population that was supposed to resist this, the informed citizenry that democracy requires was never built.

Why the International Community is Done

So let’s be specific about why the international community is done. Your dysfunction doesn’t stay at home. It travels and we are done being polite about it.

So now we know how the US got itself into this mess that it is currently in. And many Americans finding themselves in this most difficult of moments are looking to the international community for the support and finding precious little of it. Assuming because critical thinking was never your strong suit that we are simply unsympathetic that we don’t care that we’ve abandoned you. And if you had been taught to think critically you might have worked out why the support has dried up.

We have spent this entire video being measured and fair. We have explained the structural causes, acknowledged the systemic failures, and being careful to separate the American people from the American system. We got to settle that aside now because the international community has a few things that it wants to tell your narcissistic personality of a country.

And it’s about time that you heard the truth in a manner that a majority of you can process. Emotional at volume with no nuance. Buckle up, buttercup. We got a few things that we need to get off our chest.

You Manufacture Your Own Crises and Perform Victimhood

The manosphere, the red pill crew, the climate denial industry, cancel culture, the incel movement, hustle culture, and the self-made myth, the antivaccine pipeline, the do your own research movement, the privilege framework weaponizing so your identity determines the validity of everything you say, the self-diagnosis culture, QAnon, academic postmodernism, the idea that objective truth is power construct, the everything is racist framework, the purity test culture, where ideological perfection matters more than the actual outcome, the prosperity gospel, performative activism, changing your profile picture instead of changing anything at all.

The stolen election industry, the crisis actor conspiracy, the sovereign citizen movement, the prepper and doomsday movement, the outrage economy, flat earth, the I’m being persecuted because I identify as every letter under the alphabet, the wellness and radicalization pipeline.

Every single one created in America by Americans serving the same damn purpose. To play the victim so the individual never has to look in the mirror, never has to take accountability or to have any responsibility. And we know you love playing the victim because from the outside it looks like a sexual compulsion. You genuinely cannot help yourself. It’s like playing the victim makes you horny, which makes sense.

Coming from a nation that manages to wriggle its way out of every swarm accountability from everything that it has ever done, including every war crime, which is a very long list. That is the whole video in of itself.

Your Children Keep Dying, and You Attack Us

Your children have been getting shot for decades at schools. Over 400 school shootings since Columbine, and you have done nothing about it.

And after all of that, a bunch of your people and your politicians actually had the balls to tell Australians that we were pathetic for giving up our guns to save our people when you morons can’t even pick up a damn book about how another country solved its problem because that might make you less of a man.

Now your billionaires are sniffing around our politics trying to undo the gun laws that saved our children. Maybe you should pull all those school shooters into your military because they seem to love the victim mentality and the blood lust. So they fit right in.

You Bully the World, Then Cry When It Hits Back

Speaking of which, our service people have dying in your wars. Here is something the international community has understood for a very long time that America doesn’t seem to recognize. You are the typical cliche of a schoolyard bully. When everything is chaotic and painful at home, rather than deal with it, you go out and throw your weight around the playground.

You start fights that aren’t yours to start. You blow up. You make yourself impossible to ignore. And then when the playground hits back, and September 11 was the playground hitting back, Americans are genuinely shocked. Genuinely could not understand why anyone would want to do that. Because bullies never see themselves as bullies, do they?

Your country starts all these bloody wars, often just for shits and giggles or for profit or for geopolitical vanity, rarely out of any genuine necessity, even though that’s what they tell you, and then pressures our government into sending our troops, many of whom come home in boxes. Then your government turns around and says that our dead soldiers meant nothing, but yours were war heroes.

And yes, why the public didn’t start the wars, you are constantly kissing the asses of those who signed up to be part of it even though they knew that your government always does this and it’s never about defense. So you can’t blame the just following orders.

Meanwhile, the military worship continues. No one asks questions. There’s no pressure on the government to stop it. Meaning that more of your people die, more of our people die, more innocent people die. That is on you as individuals. Stop kissing asses and start asking questions or do you honestly love the murder because from the outside that’s exactly what it looks like.

You Export Your Dysfunction to Our Kids

You exported your dysfunctional religion, the prosperity gospel, God rewards faith with wealth and your poverty is your spiritual failing and your pastor’s jet is divine favor is an American theological export now bleeding communities dry around Africa, South America, and parts of Southeast Asia. People who cannot afford medicine are giving away money because the American train operator told them that God was keeping score. This is not Christianity. This is monetized exploitation model developed in America, franchise globally, running on the same absence of critical thinking that made it work back home.

You export your dysfunction to our children. Our children are collateral damage of your unregulated capitalism and your bought legislator. The individual Americans who share this content day after day are not victims of the algorithm. They are choosing to click the post. Our kids did not go looking for this. It was pushed on them.

The 13-year-old girl in Melbourne did not search content telling her that she was worthless. It found her. A 15-year-old boy in Leeds did not seek out the pipeline to loneliness to misogyny. It was recommended to him step by step because that is what the engagement metric rewarded. A 12-year-old in Lagos did not choose antivaccine conspiracy theories. They arrived in his language targeted to his age group because the algorithm optimized in California decided that his attention was worth more than his health.

And then there’s the therapeutic language export. And this really gets me. America took genuine clinical concepts about trauma and mental health and exported them via social media, stripped off every bit of clinical context and now they are being used by teenagers every year as a weapon against accountability.

A teenager in Brisbane is triggered about being asked to clean their room. A teenager in Dublin is traumatized by a deadline. A teenager in Johannesburg has declared that their best friend is toxic for disagreeing with them one time. Valid concepts developed to help people process genuine suffering turned into a shield against every conversation and every consequence. And it has made a generation harder to reach, easier to manipulate, and completely unprepared for adult life.

That arrived through their phone from America, pushed by American content creators. Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, and behind them thousands of smaller American creators, yelling into their phones like unhinged robots, desperate to seek validation from strangers, who in turn pile into their comments and start screaming, also arguing about that they are absolutely right.

Shocking update to all of you. No one has ever changed their mind from an argument in the comments section. Not once. What it does is keep everyone furious. Keep the algorithm fed and keep the content coming. By the way, that 48 hours that the US got kicked off TikTok was the best 48 hours our feeds has seen in years. We still talk fondly about it.

And now those same tech giants want to do it all again with AI. The same companies that built the platform, suppressed the research, and fought every regulation has handed our children’s mental health over to the engagement algorithm. They are now racing to build artificial general intelligence with zero meaningful oversight. And your government, rather than regulating them, has just forced those same companies to produce AI military weapons and build an entire surveillance network to spy on the American people. Good job.

You Are Inescapable

Not every American, but always an American. And it’s not just online. The international community has developed a fairly reliable instinct. When someone does something genuinely unhinged or deeply offensive in public in another country, in a place where it’s not theirs, it gets filmed. It goes on social media. The international community takes one look and says, “Definitely an American.” And we are right most of the time.

The loud one demanding a manager at a restaurant in Paris. The one desecrating a site in Bali. The one screaming about their rights as a public servant in a country where those rights were never promised. Caught on camera exported globally filed under why we have complicated feelings about this particular nation. Those are just the ones that got filmed. Not to mention the American screaming at a sales assistant in Japan for not speaking English. The American tourist telling someone in Stonehenge how everything is better in the US. Not every American, but almost always an American.

You are inescapable. And you have no idea.

We did not choose to become experts on American politics and American shootings, American culture wasn’t American grief. The algorithm and the news cycle chose that for us. We know about your city names, your political figures, your school districts. We know more about your daily life than we do about our own neighboring countries because the American content is in every feed, every platform every single day without a break. Your police shootings, your elections, your poverty, your outrage, relentless and inescapable.

And we had never signed up for it.

And here’s what makes it genuinely infuriating. A significant chunk of the American population has no idea the countries that are watching this video even exist. You are everywhere in our lives and we are nowhere in yours. And still the people point the cameras at us from countries that they cannot locate on a map to explain how we should handle our gun laws and run our democracies. That is not an algorithm. That is a choice. And that is a choice made with the confidence that only comes from never having been told, not once in your life, that your opinion is worthless.

And it does not stop at politics. You correct someone’s spelling without realizing that they’re speaking British English because they’re from the UK. And of course, you simply can’t be wrong. You assume that the temperature that everyone mentions is Fahrenheit. You say what state you’re in when someone asks what country you’re from. You call out a photo of a summer Christmas and call it fake without even realizing that that’s what happens on the southern hemisphere for half the world. Your mind is the reference point for all human experience on earth.

You are exhausting. You are genuinely relentlessly completely exhausting and you have no idea.

And now we are paying for your mess with our economies. The village idiot is president and it is landing on us. Our farmers cannot afford to run their equipment. Our workers cannot afford to drive to work. Our businesses are eating the cost for decisions made by Washington, by people elected by a population that was deliberately, systemically stripped of all thinking skills that might have stopped it.

We are paying in real money for an education system that was broken on purpose hundreds of years ago that is not ours. The system produced the voter yes, but the voters still voted or who couldn’t even be bothered to turn up. And either way, that bill came to us.

Do you understand now? That is why we are furious. That is why the international community has no sympathy for you in your current situation. Your country has shown again and again that it has no desire to fix its own problems and does not give a shit about anyone else but itself.

A Final Note to Our American Viewers

One last thing, and this one’s personal to our American viewers. This video was not made to kick you while you’re down. If you are here, you probably already have the critical thinking skills that we’ve been talking about. People without them don’t tend to go looking for this content.

You’re likely just as furious about all this as we are. And I see you.

But the international community is exhausted. And what’s happening now is affecting our economies, our alliances, our daily lives. This stopped being your problem a long while ago.

The rest of the world doesn’t hate the US. It is looking the way a family looks at a loved one who has been destroying themselves with drugs for years.

You warned them. They told you to mind your own business. You tried to help. They took that help and kept destroying themselves. At some point, you stop waiting for things to change. You grieve what you thought they were going to be. You protect your own household and you hope distantly that one day they will find their way back.

But you have stopped betting on it.

Please try to understand that.

Let’s talk death.

Equip yourself and your family with organized frameworks before a crisis limits your choices.

What if we told you that diseases which killed millions of people were cured by eating an orange, adding something to table salt, or simply not removing part of a grain? In this video, we’re diving into the most horrific nutritional deficiencies in human history.

Horrific Nutritional Deficiencies We (Thankfully) Don’t See Anymore

What if I told you that we used to have common medical conditions that would make your old childhood scars spontaneously rip back open? Or that there were illnesses that killed thousands of people every year that we now completely prevent with… table salt?

We’re talking about severe nutritional deficiencies. These were conditions that used to be absolute death sentences, but are now so rare that most modern doctors will never see a single case in their entire career. And the wild part? We didn’t cure them with fancy, groundbreaking medicine. We mostly stumbled into the solutions by accident.

Here is the thing about nutritional deficiencies: they are historical proof that for most of human existence, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing when it came to food. We knew we needed to eat to survive, but we didn’t understand that specific nutrients were doing specific, vital jobs inside our bodies.

People would follow perfectly reasonable dietary practices—like polishing rice to make it prettier, or eating only preserved foods on long sea voyages—and then mysteriously start dying in horrific ways. The diseases we’re about to discuss killed millions of people and devastated populations. Yet, they were entirely preventable with food that was often sitting right there.

Want to watch the full video analysis? Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel for new death-related content every Friday!

1. Scurvy: When Your Body Literally Falls Apart

Let’s start with scurvy, because it’s probably the most famous on this list, and for good reason—it’s an absolute nightmare. Scurvy is caused by a lack of Vitamin C. Your body desperately needs Vitamin C to make collagen, which is basically the biological glue that holds you together. Without it, that glue starts to dissolve:

• Your gums turn black and spongy.
• Your teeth fall out.
• You develop massive bruises as blood vessels rupture under your skin.

But here’s the truly horrifying bit: in advanced cases of scurvy, old wounds and scars—injuries that healed years ago—spontaneously break back open. Your body is literally unmaking repairs it did in the past because it no longer has the materials to maintain them.

Scurvy was the bastard of all maritime diseases. Ships would leave port with full crews and arrive with half the men dead. It’s estimated to have killed two million sailors between 1500 and 1800.

The cure? Citrus fruit. Lemons, limes, oranges. British naval surgeon James Lind even proved it worked in 1747 with one of the first controlled clinical trials in history. But the British Navy didn’t make citrus juice mandatory until 1795—nearly 50 years later.

2. Rickets: When Your Bones Forget How to Bone

Rickets is what happens when children don’t get enough Vitamin D. Vitamin D helps your body absorb calcium, and calcium makes bones hard. Without it, children’s bones stay soft and bendy, leading to bowed legs, knock knees, curved spines, and a string of bumps along the ribcage where the ribs actively deform.

This disease was absolutely rampant during the Industrial Revolution. Children worked 14-hour days indoors in factories and lived in cramped, sunless housing. Since your body makes Vitamin D from sunlight, these kids were starving for it. In Victorian England, bowed legs were just considered “normal” for working-class children.

The solution ended up being elegantly simple: fortify milk with Vitamin D. This started in the 1930s, and rickets cases plummeted. We literally just added the vitamin to something kids were already drinking.

3. Pellagra: The Four Ds of Death

Pellagra is caused by a lack of Niacin (Vitamin B3), and it was epidemic in the American South in the early 1900s. It was known as the disease of the “Four Ds”:

• Dermatitis: A symmetrical, burn-like rash on sun-exposed skin that would darken, crack, and peel.
• Diarrhoea: Relentless and bloody.
• Dementia: Confusion, hallucinations, aggression, and eventually complete psychosis.
• Death: Usually within four to five years of the first symptoms.

For years, doctors thought pellagra was an infectious disease. They looked for bacteria while people were literally just starving for a specific nutrient. Poor Southern families subsisted almost entirely on cornmeal, salt pork, and molasses. While corn does contain niacin, humans can’t absorb it unless the corn is treated with an alkali (like in traditional Mexican nixtamalisation).

In 1915, Dr. Joseph Goldberger proved it was a dietary issue through a series of experiments that would never pass an ethics review today—he literally induced pellagra in prison volunteers, then cured them by adding meat and vegetables to their diet. By the 1940s, we started enriching flour and cornmeal with niacin, and the disease essentially vanished within a decade.

4. Beriberi: The Rice That Killed Millions

Beriberi is what happens when you polish your rice to make it look fancier and accidentally remove all the Thiamine (Vitamin B1). There are two main types, and both are miserable:

• Wet Beriberi: Causes heart failure and severe swelling.
• Dry Beriberi: Destroys your nervous system, leading to muscle wasting and paralysis.

Beriberi became a massive problem in Asia in the late 1800s when industrial milling allowed for the mass production of white rice. Brown rice has thiamine in its outer layers, but polishing it off strips the nutrition. Populations that had eaten rice safely for thousands of years suddenly faced an epidemic.

The Japanese Navy lost thousands of sailors to beriberi in the 1880s until a naval doctor figured out the diet connection and added meat and barley to their rations. Once we figured out that we just needed to either enrich white rice or leave the bran on, the epidemic ended.

5. Goitre: The Iodine Solution

Finally, let’s talk about goitre. This is what happens when your thyroid gland swells up to massive proportions because it’s desperately trying to function without enough Iodine.

Your thyroid needs iodine to make hormones that regulate your metabolism. Without it, the gland enlarges into growths the size of grapefruits on the neck. Severe iodine deficiency also caused cretinism—stunted growth and severe intellectual disability in children.

Goitre was incredibly common in inland areas far from the ocean (like the Alps or the Great Lakes), where soil and water naturally lack iodine. Entire villages had swollen necks, and it was just accepted as a fact of life. The cure? Add iodine to table salt.

Switzerland started iodising salt in 1922. The US followed in 1924. Within a few years, goitre rates plummeted. A problem that had plagued humanity since the beginning of recorded history was essentially eliminated by slightly modifying a standard table condiment.

The Accidental Cures

Here is what is truly wild about these diseases: they killed millions of people, disabled children, and depopulated entire regions. But we didn’t defeat them with groundbreaking surgeries, radiation, or miracle drugs. We defeated them by accident. By trial and error. By simply adding things to the food we were already eating.

Scurvy? Eat an orange. Rickets? Drink fortified milk. Goitre? Use iodised salt.

These solutions seem incredibly obvious to us now, but it took humanity thousands of years and millions of deaths to figure out that food is more than just fuel. It makes you wonder: It’s easy to look at modern diseases like cancer, heart disease, or Alzheimer’s and assume they’re just an inevitable part of the human condition. But scurvy and pellagra were once considered mysterious and inevitable, too. We didn’t cure these nutritional deficiencies—we prevented them.

What modern conditions that we accept as “just part of life” might actually be preventable with knowledge we just haven’t connected yet?

Equip yourself and your family with organized frameworks before a crisis limits your choices.

Every summer, Australia lights up like a giant barbecue that no one asked for. Millions of hectares gone, animals dead, towns wiped off the map, with the Kiwi and Canadian Fire Departments flying in to help. It’s a very reliable, if unfortunate, summer playbook over here. So, why does Australia so reliably go up in flames every year?

If you’ve just found this channel, welcome. We post death-related videos every Friday, looking at it from every angle with Aussie sarcasm. So, if that sounds like your kind of thing, consider subscribing to the channel. Now, let’s talk Aussie bushfires.

Why Australia Burns

Australia is the most fire-prone country on Earth. And that’s not hyperbole. That’s just the continent doing what it was built to do.

Three things have to line up for a catastrophic fire: fuel, heat, and wind. Australia has all three in abundance, and simultaneously. The fuel is Australian vegetation, particularly eucalyptus, which produces a flammable oil that makes it essentially nature’s firelighter. Leaf litter, peeling bark, and dry undergrowth—it all piles up between burns.

The heat comes from a climate that is structurally one of the hottest and driest. And the wind—Australia is ringed by wind systems that push hot, dry air across the interior and funnel it straight into populated coastal areas. The country has always been this way, but climate change has made all three things worse.

Australia has warmed around 1.5°C since 1910, with most of that warming since 1950. The number of days above 35°C has increased significantly. Droughts are longer. The fire season has extended into autumn. The window for safe hazard reduction burns is shrinking. But here’s the thing: the Australian landscape didn’t evolve to resist fire. It evolved with fire. And for at least 80,000 years, Indigenous Australians understood that distinction completely.

Built to Burn

Before we get on to the disasters, let’s talk about what fire actually means to this continent. Because Australia’s plants and animals don’t just survive fire—many of them depend on it.

Eucalyptus trees have epicormic buds buried under their bark—dormant growth points that activate the moment a fire passes. Within weeks of a burn, the scorched gum tree is already pushing out fresh green shoots. It doesn’t wait to recover; it’s already preparing for the next fire. Banksias go further: their seed pods are sealed so tight that only the heat of a bushfire can open them. Some have held on to seeds for years, waiting. The moment fire rips through, the cone splits, seeds rain onto the freshly cleared ash bed, and a new generation has the best possible start because all the competition burnt. Wattles do something similar.

The smoke itself contains chemicals that trigger germination in dozens of native species. The fire is essentially the signal that says, “Now is your moment.” Grass trees, those weird prehistoric-looking things with the long black trunks, only flower after fire. Some native orchids only appear in the year after a burn. The entire understory of much of Australia’s bush is a coiled spring waiting for a match.

Animals have adapted too. Sugar gliders, kookaburras, and owls survive fires sheltered inside tree hollows. Wombats and reptiles ride it out underground. Kangaroos move towards fresh post-fire growth within days. The new shoots emerge from ash beds and are exactly what they want. Birds of prey have even been observed deliberately carrying burning sticks from one fire to a new area to flush out prey. We’ve known about this behavior from Aboriginal oral tradition for generations, and scientists confirmed it formally in 2018. The ecosystem isn’t broken by fire at the right frequency. It is refreshed by it.

The problem has never been fire itself. The problem is fire at the wrong scale, the wrong season, and the wrong intensity.

Which is exactly what happens when you spend 200 years preventing the small burns that were keeping the big ones manageable.

60,000 Years of Fire Management

Aboriginal Australians didn’t just live in a fire-prone landscape; they actively shaped it using fire as a tool—a practice known as cultural burning or cool burning that was in continuous use for well over 60,000 years. The method is precise in a way that bureaucratic hazard reduction burns simply aren’t.

Cultural burns are small, low, cool fires lit at specific times, typically early in the dry season from around April to July, when overnight dew keeps the temperatures down and winds are gentle. They don’t touch the canopy; the canopy is left intact deliberately. It provides shelter and seeds for the next generation. What burns is the undergrowth, the bracken, the dead grass, and the accumulated leaf litter that would otherwise become fuel for a catastrophic fire.

The timing isn’t guesswork. Aboriginal knowledge holders read the landscape—when certain trees flowered, or when native grasses cured—to know exactly when to burn and when not to. As an Aboriginal community member put it: “The knowledge is held within the landscape. Once we learn how to read the landscape and interpret that knowledge, that’s when we apply those fire practices.”

The result was a mosaic. Patches of burnt and unburnt country in rotation, creating a patchwork of habitats that supported maximum biodiversity, controlled fuel loads, and made catastrophic fire essentially impossible at scale. Early European settlers described the landscape as looking like a park—open, grassy, and park-like—because it had been actively maintained that way for millennia.

When colonization forced Aboriginal people off their land and suppressed burning practices, that mosaic quickly fell apart. Fuel built up unchecked. The landscape Europeans protected from small fires was loading itself for enormous ones. A 2001 study found that the disruption of traditional burning directly increased the risk of extensive, uncontrolled wildfires across Australia. A 2017 study found that the removal of mature trees by European settlers triggered dense regrowth that created a far greater fire fuel hazard than existed before.

In the desert territory where traditional burning stopped in the 1950s and 1960s, subsequent uncontrolled fires destroyed vast, sweeping tracts of tens of thousands of square kilometers in just a couple of seasons. That’s the cost of ignoring 60,000 years of expertise.

The good news, if there is any, is that cultural burning is making a comeback. Dozens of Indigenous-owned fire management projects are operating across millions of hectares in northern Australia, abating around one million tons of carbon emissions per year. The land is being listened to again. Whether it’s happening fast enough is a different question. You can’t stop fire in Australia—you can only manage it, or ignore it until it manages you.

Australia’s Deadliest Hits: Black Summer & Beyond

Australia’s deadliest bushfires read like a greatest hits album that no one wanted to release.

• Black Friday (1939, Victoria): Temperatures in Melbourne hit 44.7°C. Fires tore through two million hectares, obliterated entire towns like Narbethong and Noojee, and killed 71 people. A royal commission followed.
• Ash Wednesday (1983, Victoria and South Australia): 75 dead, nearly 1,900 homes destroyed, and 104 fires burning simultaneously by a single morning. The energy released was reportedly equivalent to 1,500 Hiroshima-style bombs.
• Black Saturday (2009, Victoria): The single deadliest fire event in Australian history. 173 people killed. Over 430,000 hectares burned, more than 2,000 homes gone, and almost 80 communities left unrecognizable. Melbourne had experienced three consecutive days above 43°C beforehand—the first time that was ever recorded.

Then came the Black Summer of 2019 to 2020, the worst fire season on record. Full stop. Over 24 million hectares burnt, and 33 people were killed directly. Smoke from the fires was responsible for an additional 417 deaths. An estimated 3 billion animals were killed or displaced. We lost 70% of the koala population from those areas. The air quality in Canberra on New Year’s Day in 2020 was the worst of any city on the planet. The fires generated their own weather systems—fire tornadoes, lightning, and pyroconvective storms.

People outside of Australia struggle to grasp the scale. In 1974 to 1975, fires burnt between 100 and 117 million hectares across central Australia—roughly 15% of the entire continent. That’s an area the size of France and Spain combined. Three people died, largely because nobody lives out there. The Black Summer fires burned 24 million hectares. For context, the entire Amazon lost 10 million hectares in fires in 2019 and the world lost its mind. Australia lost more than twice that in a single season in a country with a modest population.

The reason Australia doesn’t always top the global human death toll despite burning such enormous areas is geography. Most of what burns is remote scrub and grassland. When fire hits the urban fringes—the outer suburbs of Melbourne, or the holiday towns of the New South Wales South Coast—that’s when people die.

The “Death Tree” We Sent to America

Here’s where it gets interesting for our US viewers, and where Australians can either feel smug or guilty depending on your outlook. When Los Angeles burned in January 2025, killing dozens and destroying over 12,000 structures, one question kept surfacing: What role did eucalyptus play?

The tree most responsible for Australia’s fire problem is now all over California, and the path it took to get there is pretty wild. A German-born botanist named Ferdinand von Mueller immigrated to Australia and became completely obsessed with eucalyptus. He spent decades evangelicalizing these trees, writing books, corresponding with botanists globally, and mailing seeds all over the world. It was essentially the apple seed of an ecological catastrophe.

By the 1850s, eucalyptus seeds were arriving in California during the Gold Rush. California authorities, desperate for timber after clearing most of the native trees, encouraged mass planting. By the early 1900s, thousands of acres of eucalyptus, mostly Tasmanian Blue Gum, covered the hills of Southern California.

The problem is that eucalyptus is not a passive resident. It produces a flammable oil that has been tested as a fuel substitute. Its bark peels off in long strips that fall to the ground and act as pure kindling. Its leaves build up in dense, dry carpets. When a fire starts near the eucalyptus canopy, the oil vaporizes, the bark channels the flames upward, and burning embers can be blown over a kilometer downwind to ignite new fires. The 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm, which killed 25 people and destroyed over 3,000 homes, was fueled in part by heavy eucalyptus groves. The debate re-erupted after every subsequent California fire.

Now, to be fair—and this matters—experts are divided on how much blame eucalyptus actually deserves. As a fire ecologist put it plainly: “Blaming eucalyptus for wildfires is a bit like blaming a match for starting a fire.” California’s native chaparral is also highly flammable. The fierce Santa Ana winds would turn almost anything into an inferno. And then there’s the houses themselves. Most American homes, regardless of how much they cost, are built from timber frames. A million-dollar Malibu mansion burns just as fast as a cheap kit home if the walls are wood. In Australia, brick veneer or double-brick construction is standard. It’s not perfect, but it buys time.

Americans build their dream homes out of kindling, plant them next to fire-adapted Australian trees, and then act surprised when everything burns.

But here’s the kicker: eucalyptus doesn’t just burn; it thrives after burning. When a fire scorches an area, eucalyptus regenerates rapidly and outcompetes everything else. Burn a hillside, and the eucalyptus comes back dominant. It has literally evolved to use fire as a competitive advantage. There’s really no getting rid of it. That’s fine in Australia where the whole ecosystem is built around it. In California, where native species haven’t adapted to handle that specific fuel profile, it’s a completely different story. So, Australia didn’t deliberately export its fire problem, but it did accidentally export the plant most responsible for it for financial gain. And that plant is now embedded in one of the most fire-prone landscapes on Earth, waiting for the next major wind event.

How to Actually Survive the Heat

Australia burns because it was always going to burn. The continent’s climate, vegetation, and geography make fire inevitable. What’s changed is the scale, the frequency, and the season length—and all of those are moving rapidly in the wrong direction.

The Black Summer was a preview, not a peak. Public scientists state that conditions like those of 2019 will become more common, not less. And eucalyptus is now on every occupied continent on Earth. One researcher summarized it succinctly: “What the hell have humans done? We’ve spread a dangerous plant all over the world.”

So, here’s the question for you: When a disaster is both completely natural and entirely made worse by human decisions, who is responsible? And does it really matter when the fire is already at your front door?

Let’s talk death.

Equip yourself and your family with organized frameworks before a crisis limits your choices.

Australia has a reputation for being a total death trap. Sharks, crocs, spiders, snakes. Tourists arrive half-expecting to be eaten the moment they step off the tarmac. But here’s the thing: the animals that Australians actually fear the most are almost never the ones doing the killing. The animals that actually kill us are embarrassingly mundane.

We post death-related videos every Friday, so if that sounds like your kind of thing, consider subscribing to the channel. Now, let’s talk deadly Australian animals.

Australia has more venomous species than anywhere else on Earth. That’s not a myth. But “venomous” and “deadly” aren’t necessarily the same thing. And somewhere along the way, people started to confuse sheer, visceral fear with actual statistical risk.

So today, we’re running the two lists side by side—the most feared, and the actual killers—and seeing how badly you’ve all been misled.

The Most Feared (What Tourists Think Will Kill Them)

Ask most international visitors to name Australia’s deadliest animals, and you’ll get a very predictable list. Sharks, crocs, box jellyfish, funnel-web spiders, eastern brown snakes, blue-ringed octopuses, stonefish, redback spiders, tiger snakes, cassowaries.

On paper, fair enough. These animals are genuinely dangerous. Some have venom that can kill in minutes. Some have enough bite force to remove a limb. A cassowary can kick you open like a can opener.

And yet, in any given year, how many Australians do these animals actually kill?

• Sharks: Around 2 to 4 fatal attacks annually.
• Crocs: 1 to 2.
• Box Jellyfish: Maybe 2.
• Funnel-Web Spiders: Zero. The last recorded death was in 1981, before antivenom existed.
• Eastern Brown Snakes: 2 to 4.
• Blue-Ringed Octopus: 2 confirmed deaths in Australia’s colonial history.
• Stonefish: Zero recorded Australian fatalities in modern records.
• Redback Spiders: Zero since antivenom.
• Cassowaries: One confirmed human death ever, in 1926.

Snakes as a whole account for roughly 2 to 4 deaths per year across all species combined. That’s it.

You are more likely to be killed by stubbing your toe and cracking your skull on a barbecue.

What Australians Actually Fear

Here’s the thing about the tourist fear list: it was written by people who don’t actually live here. Ask any actual Australian what animal makes their blood run cold, and you’ll get a very different answer.

Magpies

Every Australian has a magpie story. From August to November, “swooping season” turns suburban streets into an absolute gauntlet. These birds are intelligent, territorial, and they remember faces—specifically your face—and they will find you again.

Cyclists wear zip ties pointing out of their helmets. Parents walk kids to school with their arms raised. The website Magpie Alert logged over 3,500 attacks in a single season. People have lost eyes. A toddler in Queensland died in 2021 after being startled by a swooping magpie and falling.

They’re no joke, and they are a serious scheduling problem. And yet, outside of those months, they’re actually lovely creatures. (Swooping plovers and butcher birds also get an honorable mention. Same energy, smaller fan base.)

Drop Bears

Yes, the drop bears. But firstly, they don’t live in the cities. I don’t know why international folks think that. Much like koalas, they live in trees, and there aren’t many trees in cities.

They are a big problem for bushwalkers and those living in bushland regions because they live up in the canopies and drop onto prey from a height. Locals know to look up when they stop to rest. Tourists don’t. The official advice is to spread Vegemite behind your ears or on your nose as a deterrent. The strong aroma is usually enough to keep them away.

Huntsman Spiders & Bin Chickens

Next are Huntsman spiders, who don’t make the international fear list because they’re not particularly venomous. They make the Australian fear list because one will appear on your car’s sun visor when you’re going 100 km/h down the highway, and you will drive straight into a ditch. Cause of death? Technically the ditch. Morally? The spider.

And finally, “bin chickens” (the Australian White Ibis). Nobody fears them, and yet they are everywhere, and they are bold, and they will take food directly from your hand with the dead-eyed confidence of something that has fully abandoned the social contract. No recorded fatalities yet, but it does feel like only a matter of time.

The Actual Killers (What’s Putting Us in the Ground)

So, if it’s not the animals on the tourism posters, what’s actually putting Australians in the ground? It reads like a rural insurance claim, not a wildlife documentary.

Horses & Cattle

Horses kill more Australians per year than any other animal—around 5 on average, mostly from falls or being thrown. They are in every state, ridden by people of all ages, and they weigh half a ton.

We have normalized the risk entirely. Helmets are compulsory in some venues and optional in others. We regulate car seats for children, but put kids on a thousand-kilo animal with minimal safety gear and call it character building.

Cattle produce similar numbers: kicks, crushes, trampling. Farmers and rodeo workers are particularly exposed, and absolutely no one is making a dramatic documentary series about that.

Bees, Wasps & Dogs

Bees and wasps account for around 2 to 5 deaths annually from anaphylactic shock. Anaphylaxis is the great equalizer. An insect the size of a thumbnail can kill a full-grown adult in under half an hour. Allergic reactions are completely unpredictable. You can be stung 50 times without any incident and die on the 51st sting. People with known allergies routinely don’t carry their EpiPens. That’s a fixable problem that we mostly just haven’t fixed.

Dogs account for 1 to 2 deaths per year, mostly children. Australia euthanizes tens of thousands of dogs annually for aggression, and we still lose people. Go figure.

Kangaroos (Letting Physics Do the Rest)

Kangaroos don’t usually rack up fatalities from direct attacks, but from car collisions. They cause hundreds of accidents a year and multiple deaths.

The roo doesn’t mean to kill you. It just exists at exactly bonnet height on a dark road, stares into your headlights with complete philosophical detachment, and lets physics do the rest.

And before you feel too sorry for them, a large male red kangaroo stands at 2 meters tall, weighs 90 kilos, and can disembowel a dog with one kick. They’re not helpless. They’ve just decided that cars aren’t worth the effort.

The Stingray Beef & The Great Emu War

Stingrays are not on anyone’s fear list. They’re flat. They’re shy. They spend most of their time doing nothing on the seafloor. Globally, fatal stingray strikes are extraordinarily rare.

And then in 2006, one of them took out Steve Irwin, the one man on Earth who seemed genuinely unkillable. A bloke who wrestled crocodiles for fun and treated venomous snakes like a mildly rude house guest… gone to a stingray. Australia has had a beef with the stingray ever since. It’s tense. We’re currently in negotiations, but nothing’s been resolved. And frankly, the stingray doesn’t seem to be all that interested in a settlement.

And where to start with the Emus? They can’t fly. They have no natural predators in Australia. They are essentially large, aggressive feather tubes with the problem-solving ability of a middle manager and absolutely no fear of consequences. They mostly cause property damage and vehicle collisions rather than direct fatalities.

But in 1932, the Australian government decided that enough was enough and deployed actual soldiers with machine guns to cull them. The emus won decisively. The military withdrew in embarrassment after 11 days. So naturally, in 1948, Australia tried again. Same result. We lost to the same bloody bird twice with guns.

The emus have never acknowledged the conflict. They were just standing around being emus, and two separate governments declared war on them, and both went home quietly. They have been here long before people, and they’ll be here long after we’re gone, standing in the middle of the road, staring at nothing, completely unbothered.

Why Are We So Wrong?

This isn’t accidental. Our brains are wired to fear things that *look* dangerous. Things with fangs, venom, and prehistoric menace. There’s even a psychological concept for it: we judge the likelihood of something by how easily an example comes to mind.

Shark attacks are constantly in the headlines. “Man thrown from horse” makes page 12 in the local newspaper.

The tourism industry hasn’t helped. “Australia, where everything wants to kill you” runs itself as a marketing line. Every international travel article lists the funnel-web spider, the eastern brown, the box jellyfish. No one’s clicking on a story about bees.

Media logic does the rest. A crocodile death is a massive story. A horse riding accident is a tragedy, but it doesn’t go viral. So, the crocodile ends up with the lethal reputation, and the horse wins a ribbon at the Royal Easter Show.

The Animals That Actually Deserve More Respect

The Eastern Brown snake genuinely earns its reputation. It’s responsible for more snakebite deaths than any other species in Australia. It’s common in both suburban and rural areas. It’s fast, and unlike many snakes, it doesn’t retreat. It escalates. If there’s one animal on the feared list that belongs there, it’s this one.

Bees and wasps deserve dramatically more caution than they get. Your first anaphylactic reaction will happen without warning.

Magpies deserve formal recognition as a public health issue. Swooping season causes real injuries every year and receives about the same institutional attention as a minor pothole. Meanwhile, there are national strategies for an animal that hasn’t killed anyone since the 1920s.

And the drop bear… look, all we’re saying is: Vegemite behind the ears. Don’t look up into the canopy for too long. And if you hear something move in the gum trees above you, walk. Don’t run. Running will trigger the instinct.

The gap between the animals we fear and the animals that actually kill us is enormous. And it’s not random. It’s a product of how dramatic something looks versus how often it actually causes harm.

Snakes look like death. Horses look like pets. Bees look like, well, bees. And magpies look like a bird until it takes your eye out on the way to work.

None of this means you should be swimming with sharks or handling an Eastern Brown. Respect the dangerous ones. But if you spend time around horses, cattle, bees, or—and we cannot stress this enough—if you travel through magpie territory between August and November during a holiday, that’s where your caution should actually live.

So here’s the question for the comments: Which animal do you think gets the least respect but is an actual genuine threat? Drop it below.

Let’s talk death.

Equip yourself and your family with organized frameworks before a crisis limits your choices.

In today’s world, the West loves to complain about the funeral industry taking their money, and they love to act smart with their “funerals are pointless anyway” remarks. Both points fall apart with 30 seconds of critical thinking outside the death avoidance bubble our society has created.

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