Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, widely known as MAID, is currently one of the most closely watched assisted dying programs in the world. It genuinely divides opinion among doctors, ethicists, disability advocates, and lawmakers—not just among traditional pro- and anti-VAD campaigners.
The claim that the system is “getting out of control” is not simply fringe propaganda, but it is also not a settled fact. Canada’s system has some real, well-documented problems, alongside features that are working exactly as intended. Reasonable people disagree on how to weigh that up. Welcome to Taboo Education, where every Friday we talk about death from a variety of angles. Today, we are taking an honest look at Canada’s MAID system.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Since MAID was legalised in 2016, roughly 90,000 Canadians have died via the program, including 16,499 deaths in 2024 alone (the most recent full year of data from Health Canada’s Sixth Annual Report). That accounted for 5.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada that year, giving the country the second-highest rate of assisted death in the world behind only the Netherlands. Quebec is a particular outlier, recording a global high of 7.9 per cent of all deaths in its most recent reporting year.
The growth rate is the detail critics point to most. Deaths grew by roughly 30 per cent a year in the early years. However, it is worth noting that this growth rate has been slowing for two consecutive years, even as the raw number of deaths continues to rise.
The Good: What is Working as Intended
It is important to acknowledge what is going right. The vast majority of cases fit the original, narrow intent of the law. In 2024, more than 95 per cent of recipients had a terminal illness (most commonly cancer), meaning their natural death was reasonably foreseeable. These are known as Track 1 cases.
Public support also remains incredibly high. Around 77 per cent of Canadians still support this original Track 1 criteria. Additionally, almost three-quarters of all recipients reportedly received palliative care beforehand—though that figure does not necessarily reflect whether that care was adequate or robust.
For the vast majority of Track 1 patients facing terminal illness, MAID provides a legal, supported pathway to a dignified death.
The Criticisms: Social Suffering and Unmet Needs
The sharpest criticism comes from a wide range of voices—including the United Nations, disability rights organisations, and academic ethicists. Their concerns largely revolve around vulnerability and what is termed “social suffering.”
Almost half of the people who died by MAID in 2024 reported requesting it partly because they felt like a burden to family, friends, or caregivers. Reports of emotional distress or existential suffering as a reason jumped sharply between 2023 and 2024. Critics argue this points to people seeking death because of unmet social, housing, or mental health needs, rather than an incurable medical condition per se.
Furthermore, because Canada’s healthcare is single-payer and resources are finite, MAID is relatively cheap and immediate, whereas adequate disability support or psychiatric care can involve agonizingly long waits. This creates a structural tension that is hard to dismiss.
“The argument that a cash-strapped healthcare system creates real structural pressure pushing vulnerable people toward death as the path of least resistance has genuine evidentiary support from credible sources.”
The Truchon Decision: Why Did Track 2 Arrive So Fast?
In 2021, Canada expanded eligibility to include individuals whose natural death is *not* reasonably foreseeable (Track 2). This arrived just five years after the original legalisation. So, why did such a young system expand so quickly?
It wasn’t a proactive policy choice by the government; it was a court order. In 2019, two Quebec residents with long-term, non-terminal disabilities (Jean Truchon and Nicole Gladu) challenged the original law in court. Both experienced incurable suffering, but had been denied MAID simply because they weren’t close to death. The Superior Court of Quebec agreed with them, ruling that limiting MAID to terminal cases violated their Charter rights.
The government chose not to appeal and was handed a binding deadline to rewrite the law, resulting in Bill C-7. Track 2 is the direct result of that legal obligation. This is vastly different from countries like Belgium or the Netherlands, where non-terminal eligibility was debated in parliament for years before being implemented.
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Some campaigners go as far as arguing that the government is deliberately using MAID to remove disabled or elderly people it considers a burden—even drawing deeply inappropriate comparisons to historical eugenics programs. The evidence does not support this extreme framing.
Canadian disability rights groups themselves argue a very different point: that Track 2 effectively singles out a Charter-protected group, and that systemic neglect (poverty, lack of housing, poor support services) is coercing people into choosing MAID. They are arguing about systemic neglect and a lack of alternatives, not deliberate state-directed killing. Dressing a legitimate structural critique up in the language of malice only makes genuine, actionable concerns easier for lawmakers to dismiss.
The expansion of Canada’s MAID laws was driven heavily by the courts and Charter rights, not proactive parliamentary legislation.
Australia vs. Canada: The VAD Divide
For our Australian audience, it is important to note that our system was deliberately built to avoid the criticisms Canada is currently facing. Australia has no federal VAD law; it is legislated state-by-state. The single biggest structural difference is that every Australian jurisdiction explicitly requires a prognosis of death (typically within 6 to 12 months).
Australia has no equivalent to Track 2, and explicitly excludes disability or mental illness alone from qualifying a person for VAD. Because Australia kept terminal prognosis as a hard eligibility gate, our national prevalence rate sits far below Canada’s, with Victoria recording just 0.85 per cent of all deaths in its most recent reporting period.
Sam’s Take: The Right to Die vs. System Failure
I believe everyone has the right to die. If you have the right to live, you have the right to die, provided that is genuinely what you want. But some of these cases in Canada were not about people wanting to die; they were about people who could not access the resources they needed to help them live. That is unacceptable, and if it is not a wake-up call for the government, I don’t know what is.
Canada also moved far too fast. The court case that produced Track 2 played out during COVID, and the implementation should have been postponed until the healthcare system had the capacity to handle it properly. You do not make major ethical and medical decisions in the middle of a crisis.
Ultimately, both sides of this debate hold truth. The system is functioning beautifully for terminally ill patients who want a dignified end. But for vulnerable populations facing systemic neglect, the lack of alternatives remains a glaring flaw. And with that, go talk death.
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Graves Under Fire: How Cemeteries Become Casualties of War
A cemetery is meant to be the one place a community can set aside its conflicts. They are ground reserved for grief rather than grievance. Yet across the history of armed conflict, from the trenches of the First World War to the rubble of Gaza today, cemeteries have repeatedly been drawn into the fighting itself.
They have been shelled to break civilian morale, dug up to search for hostages or evidence, and occupied by combatants who understand that tombstones and mausoleums make excellent cover. At the same time, ordinary families caught in war zones have had to face an agonising practical problem: how do you bury someone you love when the ground itself is a battlefield? Welcome to Taboo Education, where every Friday we talk about death from a variety of angles. Now, let’s talk about cemeteries during wartime.
Cemeteries as Targets: Destruction Designed to Terrorise
In some conflicts, the destruction of cemeteries is not incidental damage but a deliberate tactic aimed at civilians. During the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, Bosnian Serb forces routinely shelled and sniped at funerals as they took place. Mourners at the graveside of a young girl were fired upon while laying flowers, and gravediggers were shot at while digging, forcing families to bury their dead under cover of darkness. Imams sometimes had to hide behind coffins to finish funeral prayers while shells fell around them.
Historians of the siege have noted that this was not a case of military operations going wrong: attacking funerals was a calculated method of inflicting terror on a trapped population, denying them even the dignity of mourning in safety.
A similar pattern is visible in modern conflicts like the war in Gaza. Human rights monitors have documented that dozens of Gaza’s cemeteries have been bulldozed or severely damaged, with graves flattened, remains mixed together, and headstones removed. This includes the Gaza War Cemetery, a Commonwealth War Graves Commission site holding more than 3,600 Allied service members from the First and Second World Wars. Rights organisations argue that mixing and destroying remains constitutes a war crime, stripping families of the ability to identify their dead or ever prove what happened to them.
Sacred grounds created to preserve memory after one conflict are often caught in the crossfire of the next.
Cemeteries as Battlegrounds: Graveyards Used for Cover
Beyond deliberate destruction, cemeteries have also served as improvised fortresses for fighters seeking to avoid detection and return fire. Their dense clusters of mausoleums, crypts, and headstones offer natural cover that is difficult for an advancing force to clear.
One of the starkest modern examples came in 2004, when US Marines and soldiers fought Mahdi Army militiamen through the vast Wadi al-Salaam cemetery in Najaf, Iraq—the largest burial ground in the world. Fighters moved between tombs and underground crypts, storing weapons, launching ambushes, and hiding within the graveyard. The Najaf fighting illustrates a recurring dilemma of urban warfare: sacred or protected sites lose much of their legal protection under international humanitarian law once they are used for military purposes, yet the resulting battles still desecrate grounds that communities regard as sacrosanct.
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For families living through war, simply reaching a graveyard or finding space in one can become its own crisis. During the siege of Sarajevo, the city’s main cemetery lay too close to the front line, forcing residents to improvise. The football pitch at the Olympic Stadium was turned into a burial ground, and people in the suburbs sometimes had to bury relatives at night in front of their own apartment blocks to avoid sniper fire.
Syria’s civil war produced the exact same problem. In Aleppo, both the old and new city cemeteries ran out of room entirely, leaving bodies buried in backyards, parks, and playgrounds, marked with only token headstones. In the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta in 2018, mourners burying bombing victims in a makeshift cemetery were themselves struck by an airstrike moments later, turning a funeral into another mass casualty event.
“In protracted, besieged conflicts, burial stops being a private family matter and becomes a logistical and often life-threatening undertaking.”
No Time to Choose: Hygiene, Speed and the Loss of Options
Wartime burial is also shaped by a harder, more clinical pressure: the need to dispose of bodies quickly for public health reasons. In a siege or active combat zone, there is no possibility of extended timelines or cremation, which requires fuel, electricity, and infrastructure that besieged areas simply lack.
Decomposing bodies start to pose a genuine public health risk, so hasty burials completed within minutes—without prayers, full identification, or family present—become necessary. The living are making an impossible trade-off between honouring the dead properly and protecting those who are still alive.
The quiet assurance that a loved one’s resting place will remain peaceful and undisturbed is a privilege built entirely on peace.
An Old Problem in a New Century
What this reveals is how much choice most people in stable, peaceful countries take for granted. The quiet assurance that a loved one’s resting place will not be shelled, bulldozed, or built over is a privilege built on peace, not a universal feature of human experience.
International humanitarian law affords cemeteries special protection as civilian and cultural sites, yet that protection repeatedly proves conditional. Whether in Bosnia, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, or Gaza, the pattern recurs: the dead of war rarely rest undisturbed, and the living are left to grieve in circumstances that deny them even basic dignity. And with that, go talk death.
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Sky burial comes in a few varieties but is essentially a body disposal method of having vultures eat the dead body in order to dispose of it. Now I’ve been running this channel for quite a few years now, and without fail, every time we do a video on any sort of body disposal, there will always be one or two comments asking why sky burial isn’t common practice or why the West can’t have it.
If it was a one-off, that would be fine, but the amount of times this has been asked, quite frankly, confuses me because—and there is no polite way to say this—I thought it was obvious. But apparently not, so let’s talk about it. If you have just stumbled upon the channel, welcome to Taboo Education, where we talk about death every Friday, so consider subscribing. Now let’s talk about why sky burial isn’t commonplace.
What is it?
For those new to the term and for those who need a refresher, sky burial, the practice of leaving a deceased body exposed to be consumed by vultures and other scavenging birds, remains one of the most striking funerary customs still observed today. It is most closely associated with Tibet, where it is practised alongside parts of Mongolia and Qinghai province in China, and where it is deeply tied to Vajrayana Buddhist beliefs about impermanence and the cycle of rebirth.
A related tradition exists in Zoroastrianism (which we did a video on many years ago). In India and Iran, devotees historically used towers of silence—raised stone platforms on which bodies were laid out for vultures—so as to avoid contaminating the sacred elements of earth, fire, and water. All great, all natural, so why has this practice never spread widely beyond these regions?
Religious and Philosophical Specificity
Sky burial is rooted in specific religious traditions. In Tibetan Buddhism, it reflects the belief that the body is merely an empty vessel once the consciousness has departed, and that offering it to birds is an act of generosity, a final gesture of compassion towards other living beings. In Zoroastrianism, the logic is different again: earth, fire, and water are considered sacred and must not be defiled by contact with a corpse, so exposure on a tower of silence was seen as the only way to dispose of the body without polluting these elements.
Both rationales are highly specific to their respective belief systems and are not shared by most of the world’s major religions. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism generally emphasise burial or, in some Christian traditions, cremation, with strong doctrines around bodily respect and resurrection. Hinduism favours cremation for its own cosmological reasons. Without a doctrinal framework of this kind, there is little religious motivation for other cultures to adopt sky burial. It also goes without saying that many people would find the practice undignified and disrespectful. But that reason is really small fry compared to the other reasons.
Sky burial developed in landscapes like the Tibetan Plateau out of deep geographical and ecological necessity.
Geographic and Ecological Constraints
Sky burial developed in landscapes where it was, in many ways, the most practical option available. The Tibetan Plateau is largely rocky, frozen for much of the year, and short of timber, which makes both burial and cremation genuinely difficult. Digging a grave in ground that is frozen solid for months at a time is gruelling, and firewood suitable for cremation is scarce at high altitude. Crucially, Tibet also has one of the world’s largest surviving populations of Himalayan griffon vultures, birds large and numerous enough to consume a body within a couple of hours.
These conditions simply do not exist in most parts of the world. Temperate and tropical regions typically have softer soil and accessible timber, and even where large scavenging birds are present, they are rarely available in the numbers needed to make the practice reliable. This is precisely the problem that has undermined Zoroastrian sky burial in modern times. India’s vulture population collapsed by more than 95 per cent from the 1990s onwards, largely due to a livestock anti-inflammatory drug that proved lethal to vultures feeding on treated carcasses. With too few vultures left to consume bodies quickly, Parsi communities in Mumbai have had to install solar concentrators on the towers of silence to speed up decomposition, and many families have turned to burial or cremation instead.
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The vast majority of countries have no native vulture population capable of supporting this practice at all, and vultures cannot simply be introduced on demand. Establishing a viable population would mean importing and keeping birds (or any other animal) specifically for the purpose, effectively farming an animal to service human death rites. Beyond the practical difficulty of this, there is something uncomfortable about the idea in its own right: bending a wild species to a captive, human-scheduled role is arguably just another instance of humans reshaping nature for their own convenience.
Even where wild vultures exist, they need to learn where and when a meal will reliably appear. Vultures do not descend on a body the way scavengers might randomly do on meat they happen across. In Tibet, generations of consistent practice at fixed sites have effectively trained local vulture populations to associate those locations with food, and to gather in the numbers needed to consume a body quickly. A single family taking up the practice in isolation would not produce the regular, predictable supply that keeps a resident vulture population coming back.
“Sky burial only works as a sustained, collective practice, not as an occasional individual choice. For me, this is the most obvious point to take into account when answering this question.”
Hygiene and Practical Complications
Even where vultures are present, the practice carries genuine hygiene and logistical difficulties that make it unsuitable for widespread adoption. Vulture droppings accumulate heavily around feeding sites, and Zoroastrian towers of silence have historically needed careful drainage systems to manage this.
More troubling is the birds’ habit of regurgitating when startled or when taking off suddenly in flight, a natural defence mechanism that lightens their load so they can escape more easily. A disturbed bird can carry a partly consumed meal for a considerable distance before bringing it back up, so remains from a sanctioned exposure site could plausibly turn up kilometres away, in a park or backyard well outside any area the public associates with the practice. A pile of human bones and flesh appearing in an ordinary neighbourhood, with no obvious explanation, would understandably prompt a police investigation and public alarm.
Without a dependable, sustained population of scavenging birds, sky burial simply cannot function safely.
Legal and Public Health Barriers
Modern public health law is another major obstacle. Most countries have strict regulations governing the disposal of human remains, generally requiring burial in a registered cemetery, cremation in a licensed facility, or another sanctioned method. These laws exist partly to prevent the spread of disease and partly to regulate land use and maintain public order. Leaving a body exposed in the open would breach these regulations almost everywhere outside the areas where sky burial is formally permitted and culturally understood.
Practical Logistics
Finally, sky burial requires specific infrastructure and expertise that most places lack. Traditionally, the process is carried out by trained practitioners, who ritually prepare and cut the body so that the vultures can consume it efficiently. Purpose-built sites need to be established and maintained well away from settlements, which raises a further practical question: how does a family actually get a body there? A site remote enough to avoid hygiene problems is difficult to reach. Someone has to transport their deceased loved one over rough or unmarked terrain to a specific fixed location, on a predictable schedule.
You may like this practice and want it because you see it as natural and beautiful, but recreating it outside of areas where it organically developed would require many unnatural and probably unethical things to occur. Sky burial persists where it does because it emerged from a very particular combination of belief, environment, and necessity. Hopefully, it becomes clear why sky burial has remained a distinctive regional practice rather than a global one. And with that, go talk death.
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When a doctor says, “your loved one is terminally ill, you may want to consider hospice,” and a family immediately snaps back with, “No way! She’s a fighter!” or they are yelling at the patient to “Fight!”, what is actually going on beneath the surface? Today, we’re breaking down the hidden psychological reasons, cultural fears, and raw survival tactics behind this phrase. It’s rarely just about “fighting”—it’s about what they are terrified to face.
If you are new here, welcome to Taboo Education, where we talk about death from all angles every Friday. Now let’s talk about telling a dying person to fight.
(I have to credit the Doctor War Games Instagram page for listing many of these points. We are going to go through them and give more of an explanation to each of them. I don’t have any connection to this page, but I have found their page quite interesting and easy to view—no big words, no deep text, just simple cartoons with a lot of great points to make. I would very much recommend it to those people we all know who are not comfortable with this kind of stuff as an easy stepping stone. So go check them out.)
“I’m scared of living without her.” The Fear of Immediate Grief
For many families, agreeing to hospice feels like signing a death warrant. Saying “she’s a fighter” is an emotional defence mechanism against the overwhelming, suffocating fear of the void that will be left behind when their loved one is gone. By focusing entirely on a medical battle, they can successfully delay the agonizing process of anticipatory grief. To them, stopping treatment means confronting the terrifying reality of a world where this person no longer exists.
“My family is completely dysfunctional…” The Distraction from Chaos
In a highly dysfunctional family, a medical crisis acts like a strange kind of glue that forces everyone into temporary alignment. As long as everyone is “fighting” for the patient, they have a common enemy—the illness. This collective focus allows them to actively ignore the toxic dynamics, broken communication patterns, and unresolved trauma waiting for them at home. The frantic energy of a hospital room keeps the family’s deep-rooted issues buried under a layer of medical urgency.
“I don’t trust you.” The Medical Mistrust
When trust in the healthcare system is broken—whether due to past negative experiences, systemic discrimination, or poor communication from the current team—families view hospice recommendations with extreme suspicion. They don’t see it as a compassionate transition; they see it as the hospital “giving up” on them or trying to clear out a bed for a more profitable patient. “She’s a fighter” becomes a defensive shield against an adversarial system they believe is trying to cut corners.
For many, fighting the medical system feels like the only way to protect their loved one.
“I read about a miracle survival story.” The Outlier Trap
We’ve all seen the sensational headlines: “Doctors gave her two weeks, but she lived for 10 years!” Families desperately cling to these extreme medical anomalies because they are looking for any shred of hope. They project that one-in-a-million headline onto their loved one’s specific chart. In their minds, accepting hospice means they are actively choosing not to be the miracle story, and they refuse to carry the guilt of walking away from a potential statistical impossibility.
(One of these days we really need to do a video on the toxic positivity media and content creation around dying and disability. Let us know in the comments if that’s a video that you would find interesting.)
“She’s survived so many times before.” The Boy Who Cried Wolf Effect
When a patient has a history of bouncing back from multiple stays in the ICU, the family develops a false sense of security. They’ve watched her beat the odds three, four, or five times already, which normalizes the crisis state. Because she survived the last severe infection or organ failure, the family genuinely believes this is just another standard hurdle she is bound to overcome, making it incredibly difficult for them to recognize when the body has finally reached its physiological limit.
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“I don’t want strangers in my house.” The Privacy Protection
Transitioning to home hospice means opening your private sanctuary to a rotating door of nurses, social workers, case managers, and aides. For protective or intensely private families, the phrase “we’re going to keep fighting in the hospital” is often a mask for their deep discomfort with letting outsiders see their messy, vulnerable, or chaotic home life. They would rather endure the sterile restrictions of a hospital than expose their personal environment to strangers.
“This is the 21st century—there must be other treatments!” Faith in Modern Technology
We live in an era of rapid medical advancement, which breeds the cultural illusion that death is ultimately optional if you can just find the right trial, the right drug, or the right specialist. Families feel that stopping aggressive treatment is a failure to properly utilize the tools of the modern world. They view a refusal to try experimental chemotherapy or advanced life support as an unnecessary surrender, equating the sheer existence of medical technology with a guarantee of a cure.
“I need her to live so I can keep getting her paychecks.” The Taboo Financial Reality
It’s the dark, systemic truth nobody wants to say out loud, but it happens frequently. In many low-income or struggling households, a patient’s disability check, pension, or similar is the primary income keeping the entire family housed and fed. Transitioning to end-of-life care threatens the family’s immediate financial survival. When they insist on keeping her alive by any means necessary, they are often fighting to prevent their own immediate financial ruin.
“I live in a culture that is afraid to talk about death.” The Societal Death Taboo
Many different cultures have an issue in talking about death out loud. But modern Western culture largely treats death as a medical failure rather than the natural, inevitable conclusion to a life lived. When families use war metaphors like “she’s a fighter,” they are speaking the dialect of a society that demands toxic optimism at all costs. Because they have never been taught how to have healthy, open conversations about dying, the mere mention of comfort care feels like an unmentionable social taboo that they must aggressively push away.
Learning how to have healthy, open conversations about dying is the first step in breaking the societal death taboo.
“She will give up and get depressed in hospice.” The Misconception of Care
There is a massive, widespread misconception that entering hospice means a patient will simply be placed in a dark room, stripped of all dignity, and left to wait for the end. Families worry that removing the goal of a “cure” will crush their loved one’s spirit and cause them to spiral into despair. They don’t realize that hospice is designed to do the exact opposite—removing painful, futile interventions so the patient can actually enjoy their remaining time with family.
“Hospice kills people!” The Morphine Myth
A terrifyingly common and persistent myth is that hospice workers actively hasten death by administering lethal doses of morphine to patients. When a family fiercely rejects a hospice referral, they aren’t just being difficult—they are often reacting out of literal fear for their loved one’s safety. They genuinely believe that signing those papers means handing their relative over to a system that will deliberately shorten their life, rather than managing their pain.
“People will judge me if I don’t look after her myself.” The Burden of Outside Judgment
Guilt and social pressure are incredibly powerful motivators. Caregivers are often terrified of what their extended family, neighbours, or church community will say if they “give up” and hand the patient’s care over to an agency. To them, saying “she’s a fighter” really translates to: “I am terrified of being judged as a lazy, unloving, or abandonment-prone child or spouse by the people in my social circle.”
“She always fought for us! I need to fight for her.” The Debt of Gratitude
This is perhaps the most heartbreaking driver behind the phrase. When a matriarch or patriarch has spent their entire life sacrificing, working multiple jobs, and fighting through adversity to provide for the family, the children feel a profound debt of gratitude. They mistakenly view allowing a peaceful, natural death as a betrayal of that person’s strong legacy, falsely equating modern medical torture with a demonstration of familial love and loyalty.
“Next time you hear someone say ‘she’s a fighter,’ remember it’s rarely about stubbornness—it’s usually a cry of fear, love, or protection.”
Join the Conversation
If you’ve ever had to navigate these difficult conversations in a hospital or with your own family, how did you handle it? Let me know in the comments below. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and donate to our book project, and I’ll see you in the next video. Now, go talk death!
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Human beings are uniquely burdened with the awareness of their own mortality. According to Terror Management Theory (TMT), when we are forced to confront the inevitability of death, aging, or a lack of purpose, we experience an acute existential anxiety that we desperately try to soothe. For over a century, the global advertising machine has recognised this vulnerability not as a psychological crisis to be healed, but as a premier commercial opportunity.
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By systematically stoking our fears of physical decay, social irrelevance, and absolute erasure, major global industries have learned to manufacture a profound sense of panic—only to immediately present their own products and services as the ultimate, comforting shield.
Ethical Marketing vs. Unethical Exploitation
To be clear: not all advertising is inherently evil. Marketing simply refers to the activities a brand uses to promote its services and build awareness. Ethical advertising builds long-term public trust by remaining honest, respectful, and transparent—sharing clear pricing and real facts without relying on manipulation. (Here in Australia, a brand like Bunnings often comes to mind).
Unethical advertising, on the other hand, relies on deception, hidden costs, and psychological manipulation to drive quick sales. It systematically exploits our deepest subconscious vulnerabilities. The difference always comes down to intent and truth.
With that distinction in mind, let’s look at 11 major industries known for questionable marketing tactics, and how they weaponise your death anxiety to profit off your existential dread.
“By systematically stoking our fears of physical decay, social irrelevance, and absolute erasure, major global industries have learned to manufacture a profound sense of panic—only to immediately present their own products and services as the ultimate, comforting shield.”
11 Industries Profiting From Your Fear of Death
1. The Anti-Aging & Longevity Industry
The global anti-aging sector operates by framing the natural biological process of growing older as an aggressive, technical failure of self-care. By expanding its reach from standard wrinkle creams to high-tech “prejuvenation” and cellular biohacking, the industry targets increasingly younger demographics, convincing people in their twenties that their bodies are already in a state of active decay.
AI skin-analysis apps and clinical vocabulary uncover microscopic flaws that would otherwise pass unnoticed, creating an urgent, expensive surveillance routine. By pairing scary statistics about environmental toxins with serums and supplements, brands position their products as an insurance policy for your DNA—offering a temporary, costly illusion of control over biological decay.
2. Insurance & Financial Services
The financial sector leverages intense existential guilt by forcing consumers to confront the absolute unpredictability of sudden death and disaster. Heavy-handed “fear-appeal” marketing paints vivid, catastrophic scenarios of fatal illnesses or economic ruin paired with images of vulnerable spouses or children left behind.
Once this acute anxiety is triggered, the industry reframes a sterile financial policy into an act of deep parental love and moral responsibility—selling consumers a way to dictate security for their loved ones from beyond the grave.
3. The Wellness & Diet Industry
The modern wellness movement has elevated diet and lifestyle choices into a high-stakes battle for survival. Marketing strategies routinely depict the modern world as a toxic wasteland filled with invisible threats, implying that standard grocery store choices actively accelerate your demise.
By heightening the fear of chronic disease and bodily vulnerability, these brands transform everyday eating into a ritualistic defense mechanism, promising that adhering to bio-optimized cleanses or restrictive regimens will allow you to opt out of human mortality.
When existential panic is stoked, consumers instinctively reach for products that promise a temporary illusion of control.
4. The Tech & AI “Grief Tech” Sector
Emerging digital legacy platforms directly monetise our deep-seated dread of insignificance and absolute erasure. As voice cloning and artificial intelligence accelerate, companies promote “digital immortality”—warning against the tragedy of fading memories and future generations forgetting your voice.
By offering to compile an individual’s personality into an interactive, AI-driven avatar that can read bedtime stories to great-grandchildren decades later, they turn symbolic immortality into a monthly recurring tech subscription.
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We are officially crowdfunding for our upcoming book, “But It Would Never Happen To Me”. This project breaks down the psychology of death anxiety through raw, witty stories from famous British and Australian public figures. Help us fund this crucial research and travel phase!
Once a fringe market, luxury underground bunkers have become a mainstream phenomenon by capitalizing on systemic dread surrounding supply chain failures, geopolitical conflict, and climate collapse.
Gritty, cinematic advertisements force viewers to imagine their absolute vulnerability when the electrical grid fails. The industry isn’t just selling heavy-duty gear and water filtration; it is selling a psychological buffer that promises you can survive the literal end of civilization while others perish.
6. Cryonics & Radical Life Extension
The cryonics sector targets the ultimate terror: the absolute finality of death and the complete void of non-existence. Companies explicitly reframe deceased clients as “patients” merely resting in “cryonic suspension.”
Employing a clinical spin on Pascal’s Wager, marketers argue that while burial guarantees a 0% chance of survival, freezing remains in liquid nitrogen yields a chance greater than zero. They transform an unproven procedure into a logical gamble for a second chance at life.
7. Security, Defence & “Smart Home” Tech
Smart home security brands sell products by intentionally heightening a consumer’s perception of local danger. Nighttime camera footage of masked lurkers feeds into “Mean World Syndrome,” systematically convincing viewers that their peaceful streets are constantly under siege.
By framing the home as a fortress under constant threat, these subscription ecosystems offer relief from a manufactured panic, selling a fragile sense of absolute physical safety.
8. Funeral & “Death Care” Industry
Operating within the acute window of grief, the funeral industry historically relied on subtle guilt-based emotional tiering—equating rare woods and “hermetically sealed” caskets with the depth of a family’s love.
Today, the sector pivots toward aggressive “Pre-Need Planning” insurance mailers aimed at aging adults, urging them to organize their burials so they don’t leave children with a post-mortem financial burden. It converts the abstract terror of mortality into a tidy, responsible administrative checklist.
Developing genuine death literacy strips deceptive marketing tactics of their emotional and psychological power.
While MLMs outwardly sell consumer products, their true commercial engine is recruitment—targeted squarely at anxieties surrounding the meaning of life. By critiquing the traditional 9-to-5 as a soul-crushing waste of finite time, they sell hyper-optimistic “lifestyle marketing” promising “true purpose.”
They weaponise the passage of time to make prospects dissatisfied with their realities, selling an instant community and a manufactured sense of grand entrepreneurial meaning.
10. High-End Real Estate & “Legacy” Architecture
Luxury property markets move far beyond selling square footage; they market permanence as an antidote to absolute erasure. Built squarely around the word “Legacy,” promotional campaigns highlight enduring materials like granite, marble, and oak—elements designed to withstand centuries.
Copy explicitly invites affluent buyers to “cement their place in history,” convincing them that they can successfully transfer their identity into permanent stone monuments long after their physical bodies fail.
11. Academic & Corporate “Credentialism”
The endless pipeline of executive coaching, mid-career certifications, and university degrees operates by stoking panic about becoming obsolete. Using rapid shifts in AI and automation, campaigns aggressively prompt reflection on fading authority with questions like: “Are you leading, or are you being left behind?”
By exploiting the mid-life realization that professional time is a diminishing resource, these programs position expensive bootcamps as a fountain of professional youth.
Becoming Death Literate: Breaking the Loop
Death literate people are significantly harder to sell to. When we look beneath the surface of modern advertising, it becomes clear that many of our largest economic engines are fueled by our collective refusal to accept death as a normal, natural part of life.
Corporations have commodified our deepest existential anxieties, transforming a shared human reality into a series of monthly subscriptions and premium upgrades. These campaigns do not fix our fear of mortality; they merely offer a temporary, expensive illusion of control.
By recognizing these marketing loops for what they truly are, we strip them of their psychological power. Face the discomfort, protect your mind, and go talk death.
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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.
When mortality salience rises, human psychology instinctively retreats behind defense mechanisms and group conformity.
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.
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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.
Building authentic death literacy long before a crisis strikes creates lifelong resilience against existential anxiety.
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.
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Most conversations about death literacy focus heavily on individuals and families. We talk at length about planning for your own end-of-life logistics, having uncomfortable conversations with aging parents, and knowing exactly what steps to take when a family member dies at home. But there is an entire group of people who are almost completely left out of this conversation, and they face some of the most complex, systemic, and damaging consequences when death arrives unannounced: business owners.
Whether you run a sole trader operation, a small family business, or a company with a growing team of staff, sudden death or serious incapacity can instantly unravel everything you have poured your life into building. And the profound tragedy is that most of it is entirely preventable with a baseline layer of knowledge and some strategic forward planning.
If you are employed by someone else and you die, it’s devastating for your family. But the organization you worked for will keep functioning. There are systems, backups, and HR processes. If you own the business, you often are the system.
When you are the founder or small business owner, you hold the key client relationships. You hold the master passwords. You sign the legal contracts, manage the critical suppliers, and keep the operational engines running day in and day out. When a business owner dies without preparation, the business can completely collapse within days—not because nobody cares, but because nobody left behind knows what to do or even where to start.
Without clear structural preparation, a business owner’s sudden absence transforms a thriving asset into a chaotic administrative nightmare.
What Death Literacy Actually Looks Like for a Business Owner
Death literacy in a corporate context means deeply understanding the practical, legal, and relational landscape that surrounds your business structure, and taking proactive steps to document and communicate that landscape clearly before you die or become incapacitated.
It fundamentally encompasses three pillars:
1. Knowing Your Business Structure
Are you operating as a sole trader, a partnership, a company, or a trust? Each of these setups dictates a completely different legal outcome when an owner dies. A sole trader’s business instantly ceases to exist as a legal entity upon death. A company, on the other hand, legally continues to exist because it is a separate entity from you. Understanding where you sit structurally is the true starting point.
2. Maintaining a “Business-Aware” Will
A standard personal will rarely addresses a commercial entity adequately. If you own shares in a company, your will can direct who receives those shares. But if you are a partner in a business, your partnership agreement may entirely override your will. Many business owners have absolutely no idea this is the case until it is tested by crisis.
3. Documenting Legal and Operational Authority
Your executor will inherit authority over your personal estate, but do they possess the legal standing, industry knowledge, or access codes to actually run your business while it’s being wound up or transferred? In most cases, the answer is no. A well-prepared owner will systematically document who should step in, what authority they need, and exactly how to get it.
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There’s a reason we avoid this conversation, and it isn’t just a general social awkwardness about mortality. For most business owners, the company is deeply personal. It’s a massive pillar of their identity. Thinking about what happens to it when they die can feel like confronting their own absolute irrelevance.
But death literacy asks us to completely reframe that fear. Thinking about what happens to your business after you die is not an act of morbidity—it is a supreme act of care.
It is care for your family, who may otherwise inherit an incredibly complex financial mess during their deepest grief. It is care for your employees, whose ongoing jobs and livelihoods depend entirely on the institutional decisions you make today. It is care for your clients, who trusted you with their business. And it is care for yourself, because there is an enormous sense of peace in knowing your legacy and reputation will remain intact under your terms.
5 Practical Steps Every Business Owner Should Take
You don’t need to have your entire succession framework perfectly sorted overnight. But there are baseline foundational steps worth taking right now:
Get a business-aware will: Work closely with a specialized solicitor who understands commercial business structures, not just simple personal estates.
Document your business operations: Who are your key suppliers? Where are your primary contracts stored? What are your login credentials? This vital operational data must exist somewhere secure that a trusted person can access without needing you.
Consider a buy-sell agreement: If you are in a partnership or have co-owners, a buy-sell agreement sets out exactly what happens to a deceased partner’s share. Without one, your remaining partners could suddenly find themselves in business with your spouse or children, creating a highly stressful environment for everyone.
Bring your accountant and solicitor together: Business succession sits heavily at the intersection of legal and financial advice. Aligning these professionals early saves your family massive complexity later.
Tell someone: Documenting your plans is only half the battle. Tell your partner, your co-owner, or your key employee exactly where the emergency documentation is stored. A hidden folder is just as useless as no folder at all.
Does Being Death Literate Make You a Better Boss?
Here is where the conversation turns from a defensive insurance policy into a competitive advantage. There is a strong, empirical argument that building death literacy actually makes you a far better leader while you are still very much alive and running things day to day.
Consider what death preparation requires of you. If you are seriously organizing your business to survive your sudden absence, you naturally end up documenting processes, decentralizing institutional knowledge, and systematically reducing single points of failure. That isn’t just good death preparation—that is world-class management. A business that could survive your absence is a business that already runs more efficiently, with less operational bottlenecking centered on you.
Decentralizing control and planning for contingency builds deep operational resilience and corporate trust.
It also forces you to become a more transparent communicator. Leaders who actively avoid thinking about mortality tend to avoid other hard business conversations too: succession planning, capability gaps, or how decisions get made when the primary decision-maker is out of pocket. Pushing through this barrier builds incredible trust. Staff deeply respect a leader who shows structural competence and foresight rather than one who pretends nothing bad will ever happen.
Facing finitude permanently shifts a leader’s psychological priorities. Founders who have genuinely sat with the reality of their own absence become less reactive to short-term, daily pressures and far more focused on what truly matters: the health of their people, the long-term vitality of the business, and the authentic legacy they are building over time.
Death literacy is ultimately about living and leading more consciously. Your business represents years of your life, your family’s financial baseline, and the livelihoods of people who trust you. The most generous, professional thing you can do as a founder is to make sure the people you leave behind aren’t forced to figure it all out from scratch in the middle of their grief.
Protect what you’ve built, empower your team, and go talk death.
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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.
Unconscious existential dread regularly masquerades as chronic generalized anxiety and compulsive behaviors.
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.
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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.
The midlife transition marks a permanent psychological shift from tracking years lived to evaluating time remaining.
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.
Retirement systematically dismantles a person’s primary societal identity, exposing them directly to unmediated existential questions.
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.
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This video has become an international sensation, racking up over 700,000 views and 55,000 likes. Watch the full breakdown below.
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, they make medical, financial, and political decisions based on what feels true rather than what is demonstrably true.
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.
The dominant story America tells itself is the myth of the self-made man who didn’t need schooling, just grit and “common sense.”
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.
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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. The teacher was the authority, and the authority was never to be questioned.
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.
Schools stopped teaching what was not tested. Critical thinking is not easily tested on a standardized exam.
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 childhood ritual of compulsory patriotism becomes the adult environment of ambient patriotism.
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.
Hollywood operates under a consistent set of assumptions, heavily influenced by the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison office.
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 and optimized by American engagement patterns.
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.
The prosperity gospel survives only because critical thinking was never taught to the population at large.
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.
Despite decades of tragedy, the US refuses to adopt policies that have successfully protected citizens in other democratic nations.
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.
You are everywhere in our lives and we are nowhere in yours.
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.
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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.
For centuries, civilizations consumed baseline diets completely unaware of the vital micro-compounds keeping their cellular architecture intact.
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.
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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.
The baseline solution to maritime scurvy was incredibly simple, yet millions perished before the medical establishment made citrus rations standard protocol.
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.
Sunless industrial landscapes and indoor labor settings starved generation’s skeletal frames of essential solar synthesis.
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.
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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.
Diets heavy in untreated corn meal locked vital niacin vitamins behind unabsorbable molecular configurations, initiating widespread system failures.
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.
Industrialized machinery allowed communities to polish rice into cleaner, visual presentations—unknowingly processing away their main source of neurological defense.
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.
By simply blending trace iodine levels into universal table condiments, societies easily erased a thousands-of-years-old neurological crisis.
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?
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