Law of Proximity

Last night we saw a major escalation in the Middle East war. The Israelis bombed Iranian oil fields, and in response, the Iranians are attacking the energy infrastructure of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). For instance, Qatar provides twenty percent of the world's liquefied natural gas. The entire strategy of Iran is to destroy the global economy by taking out the energy infrastructure of the GCC, because the basis of the entire global economy is cheap energy.

In retaliation for the assassination of their de facto leader, Ali Larijani, Iran is also pummeling Tel Aviv with cluster warheads that air defenses can't stop.

You'd think the Israelis would want this war to end as soon as possible, considering Tel Aviv and other cities are getting destroyed. You'd think they'd want an off-ramp. Instead, many Israelis are quite animated and very excited about this destruction. Influential rabbis in Jerusalem are openly celebrating, claiming this war of destruction will bring about the coming of the Messiah.

You can't look at this war from a geopolitical lens. You have to look at it from an eschatological perspective.

Both sides seek maximalist objectives. The United States and Israel want to destroy Iran's capacity to be a nation-state by decapitating its leadership, targeting its economy, and eventually targeting critical civilian infrastructure like water. They want to provoke ethnic conflict and balkanize the country.

The Iranians, on the other hand, want to permanently destroy the global economy. By attacking the energy infrastructure of the GCC, they aim to cut off the world's access to cheap energy. They want to trigger a massive global crisis that forces other players, like South Korea and Japan, into the fray.

The war is expanding, though to understand why it's spreading in this specific, suicidal way, we have to look past the missiles. We have to understand the rule that governs all human conflict.

The Law of Proximity

Whenever you play a game, you're not just playing one game. You're playing many different games simultaneously.

Think of your own life. You play the family game, competing for attention or social prestige. You play the school game, competing for popularity or grades to get into a good college. You play the career game, aiming to win the favor of your boss. You play the city game and the nation game.

The law of proximity states that the game most important to you is the one you're physically and socially closest to. The game right in front of you impacts your decision-making the most.

This holds true for nations. We assume the primary game is fought between nations, though the most important game is always fought within nations. The conflict within a nation is the real conflict that determines how that nation behaves toward everyone else.

To understand why this war is escalating into global destruction, we have to examine the civil conflicts in America, Israel, and Iran.

America's Civil War

There's a civil conflict right now in America between the Democrats and the Republicans, representing a deeper divide between the elite and the counter-elite.

The Democrats represent the elite. They're backed by Wall Street finance and are interested in maintaining the current global empire. The Republicans represent the counter-elite, backed by Silicon Valley tech and AI, pushing an America First agenda that wants to retreat into the Western Hemisphere.

Both sides currently support the war in the Middle East, though for completely different internal reasons.

The Democrats support this war because they believe it'll become extremely unpopular in America. They calculate that a disastrous war will destroy Donald Trump and the Republican party, allowing Democrats to dominate the midterms and rule indefinitely.

The Republicans support the war because they know that in a time of war, the president can invoke the Emergency Powers Act. Emergency powers allow the president to effectively suspend the constitution and delay elections. They also want to pass legislation like the Save America Act, which mandates voter ID to theoretically secure elections while historically serving to suppress minority turnout. If the war goes poorly, they can call a national draft and cancel elections altogether.

They don't actually care about defeating Iran. They care about obtaining and keeping power in Washington D.C.

Why is Washington so important? Because both Wall Street finance and Silicon Valley AI are massive, parasitic bubbles that'll eventually burst.

The finance sector built a two trillion dollar private credit bubble, handing out risky loans to companies without any bank oversight. They know it'll eventually collapse, though they assume the government will bail them out because they control the politicians.

The AI sector operates the exact same way. Massive tech companies lend billions to each other to inflate valuations. It's a circle jerk. They know their bubble will burst too, though they believe they control the White House and the stock market, so Washington will bail them out instead.

The government doesn't have infinite money. It can only bail out one side. If the Democrats win, private credit gets bailed out. If Trump stays in power, AI gets bailed out. That's the actual civil war happening in America right now, and foreign policy is just the battlefield they're using to fight it.

Israel's Civil War

People don't appreciate how divided Israel is. Before October 7th, Israel was tearing itself apart. Millions of people protested in Tel Aviv, calling for the impeachment and jailing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu due to massive corruption. To avoid jail, Netanyahu proposed altering the judiciary. The country was on the brink of collapse.

Then the war started. War brings emergency powers, and emergency powers keep politicians out of jail.

The division in Israel, however, is deeper than just one politician. It's a profound, irreconcilable conflict between two cities that represent two completely different visions for the country, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Tel Aviv is democratic, secular, progressive, and cosmopolitan. It's an outward-looking, Western city. Jerusalem is the exact opposite. It's a deeply conservative, religious theocracy. They passionately hate each other.

The religious zealots in Jerusalem view this conflict through a spiritual lens. They believe that inside every person is a divine soul trapped within an animal soul. Tel Aviv represents the animal soul, seeking material comfort, partying, individualism, and secular progress. Jerusalem represents the divine soul, seeking only to be aligned with God.

In their eyes, Tel Aviv is the great Satan of Israel. The fact that Tel Aviv is getting destroyed by Iranian missiles doesn't bother them. In fact, they welcome it. They recognize that if people really want to find God again, they need to suffer. They need to lose everything before they recognize the glory of God.

They want the absolute destruction of secular Israel so they can rebuild a pure theocracy centered on redemption and repentance. They don't care about the global economy. They don't care about the United States or the modern Israeli state project. They believe the spiritual state of the Jews determines the fate of the world, and once they unite with God through this suffering, the Messiah will come and bring true peace.

If you understand that this is their proximate game, their suicidal foreign policy makes perfect sense.

Iran's Civil War

Iran is dealing with its own existential crisis. The primary conflict is a rural-urban divide between secular nationalists and the Islamic theocracy.

The secular, educated class wants to see Iran function as a modern state promoting democracy and science. The religious ruling class wants to maintain rigid theocratic control.

War inevitably radicalizes both sides. The Islamic clerics are transitioning into Shia eschatology, framing the conflict as a holy war of martyrdom to bring about the return of the Mahdi, their prophesied redeemer, to lead them against the great Satan.

This religious radicalization forces the secular nationalists to radicalize in response. They embrace Persian exceptionalism, the belief that Persia is the greatest civilization in human history and is inherently worth dying for. The survival of the ancient Persian civilization becomes more important than the survival of the current Iranian state.

Iran can't afford a civil war while being bombarded by Israel and America. However, the law of proximity ensures that the Iranian factions care much more about defeating their internal rivals than they do about the external threat.

No Off-Ramps

This is why leaders are being assassinated at an unprecedented rate.

Historically, when two gangs or two nations go to war, they avoid killing each other's top leader. A war is fought to achieve political objectives, and you need the opposing leader alive to negotiate the treaty. If you kill the boss, there's no off-ramp. A power vacuum emerges, and the person who replaces the leader is almost always more extreme and more violent.

Yet the Israelis and Americans recently assassinated Ali Larijani, the de facto head of the Iranian war effort, who was known as a pragmatic operator capable of negotiating a ceasefire.

How are they finding these heavily protected leaders? Electronic eavesdropping and signal intelligence are useful, though the most reliable source of information is human intelligence, with spies embedded in local networks.

The most probable explanation for these precise, devastating assassinations is that the intelligence is coming from the inside. Due to the intense civil conflicts within these nations, competing factions are quietly giving up their own leaders to the enemy in order to eliminate internal political rivals.

By killing the pragmatists and the leaders capable of negotiation, the internal factions have ensured there'll be no ceasefire. They've guaranteed a war to the bitter end.

The Return to the Divine Soul

We're watching a war fought by nations who actually want to destroy themselves.

The global conflict is ultimately a war between two competing visions of humanity. We currently live in a global, secular, financial order driven by the animal soul, focusing on materialism, individualism, and wealth. For the past twenty years, humanity has entirely abandoned its divine soul to indulge this animal soul.

We're now experiencing a violent rupture. Societies that swing too far into one extreme always swing violently back to the other.

Over the next decade, we'll watch the global secular order fracture. Iran will become more fiercely theocratic and nationalistic. Israel will abandon its democracy and fully embrace theocracy. America, driven by its own elite civil war and economic collapse, will follow the exact same path.

The global economy will splinter into depression. The era of cheap energy and infinite material comfort is ending. Many religious thinkers, however, view this massive tragedy as the intention of the universe. We can only find redemption through complete suffering, pain, and loss. When the materialism is forcibly stripped away from us through war and economic ruin, we'll have no choice but to turn inward toward introspection, family, and each other.

The game is rigged toward destruction, precisely because it's the only way the players know how to win their conflicts at home.