The Entropical West:
History, Memory, and the Fractured World
Thesis: The Western world is not simply divided by politics or economics, but by deeper forces: inherited temperaments, uneven historical trauma, and different proximities to real danger. These create “entropical” drift — the natural decay of shared memory and strategic coherence — leaving the West misaligned at the very moment it needs unity.
Why I wrote this:
Because the West increasingly behaves like a family that keeps having the same argument every Christmas — familiar, predictable, and slightly embarrassing. We repeat patterns we should have learned from, leadership feels fractured, and ego keeps muscling in where pragmatism ought to be.
And while Trump didn’t create these cracks, he did make them rather difficult to ignore.
I. Opening: The Family Quarrel No One Wants to Admit
The longer I watch global politics, the more convinced I become that the West is living through a family quarrel on a planetary scale. Not the polite sort of quarrel you overhear in a Swedish kitchen, but the sprawling, multi-door-slamming saga of a family that has outgrown its own living room.
Europe is the ancestral house: beautiful, bruised, argumentative, steeped in memory.
North America is the child who left early, built a giant new house in the suburbs, and insists it’s not part of the old drama even while reenacting all of it.
South America is the sibling shaped by the more chaotic branch of the family, still wrestling with traumas inherited before birth.
And like all families, the arguments repeat.
New generation, same old ghosts.
This is the entropical West — a civilisation slowly drifting back into its unresolved patterns because nobody remembers where the instruction manual was left.
II. The Entropical Condition: When History Doesn’t Fade
Entropy is the natural slide from order into disorder.
History behaves the same way — especially when left unattended.
The West suffers from entropical drift:
the decay of shared memory,
the return of old reflexes,
the rise of mistrust between siblings,
and the slow forgetting of why we built all these alliances in the first place.
Some nations matured under constant threat.
Some behind oceans.
Some in comfort.
Some in crisis.
Mix them together and you get a civilisation that doesn’t perceive danger in the same way, at the same speed, or with the same emotional weight.
No wonder political coherence feels impossible.
They aren’t disagreeing about the solution — they’re living in different realities.
III. The Temperament Ladder: From Individuals to Civilisations
The most revealing pattern is this: the same temperament clashes show up at every level of the Western world.
1. Individuals
People raised in safety behave differently from those raised in danger.
Trauma teaches vigilance; comfort teaches optimism.
2. Nations
Nations behave exactly the same way:
Finland is vigilant.
Italy improvises.
Poland prepares.
France explains.
Germany hesitates.
The US acts first, thinks later.
These are identities shaped by centuries, not election cycles.
3. Blocs
Natural alliances form:
The Nordic–Baltic–Polish–Czech bloc: threat-aware, serious, pragmatic.
Southern Europe: charismatic, economically fragile, politically volatile.
France: strategically torn between memory and modernity.
Britain: floating between continents, still deciding what it wants to be.
4. Civilisation
Zoom out further and the entire West splits into three temperamental branches:
Northern Europe → North America
Southern Europe → South America
Central/Eastern Europe → Europe’s security spine
This explains why the West so often feels like a room full of people all reading different chapters of the same book.
IV. Europe’s Internal Fracture: The North–South Divide and France’s Confusion
Modern Europe is really two engines sharing one vehicle.
1. The Northern Engine
Germany, Netherlands, Nordics, Baltics, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia.
The “boring but functional” part of Europe.
Traits:
disciplined budgets
high trust
low corruption
security realism
allergy to melodrama
The adult supervision, in other words.
2. The Southern Engine
France (half the time), Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece.
Traits:
slower reforms
emotional politics
economic fragility
institutional improvisation
dramatic flair
They bring culture, warmth, philosophy — and regular constitutional heartburn.
3. France: A Country Between Mirrors
France wants to be Europe’s leader but keeps discovering that leadership has drifted north, toward Berlin–Warsaw–Stockholm–Helsinki.
It’s not a fall from greatness — it’s a mismatch of identity and reality.
4. The UK: The Missing Limb
Britain’s strengths align perfectly with the Northern bloc, yet it sits outside the room banging on about sovereignty.
Brexit wasn’t a geopolitical strategy.
It was a mid-life crisis dressed as independence.
Europe needs the UK back; deep down, the UK knows it too.
V. The Americas: Europe’s Ghosts in a New Geography
Your insight is key:
the Americas carry the traumatic effects of Europe’s causes.
1. North America = Northern Europe without the scars
Inherited:
Protestant absolutism
rule-of-law
engineering culture
moral clarity
institutional confidence
Missing:
centuries of war on home soil
humility of collapse
caution learned the hard way
Result:
a powerful but emotionally inconsistent superpower — half philosopher-king, half cowboy.
2. South America = Southern Europe amplified
Inherited:
hierarchy
Catholic political culture
charismatic leadership
clientelism
revolutionary cycles
Missing:
stabilising centuries of slow institutional reform
Result:
a region of immense talent, constant energy, and chronic instability.
3. The US–Latin American divide mirrors the EU’s North–South fault line
It’s the same pattern:
different histories
different maturities
different expectations
different relationships to danger
The family resemblance is impossible to ignore.
VI. Russia: The Old Ghost That Forces Everyone to Drop the Act
Russia is not an ordinary state.
It’s a civilisation trapped in a repetition cycle: collapse → empire → collapse → empire.
For countries that lived under its shadow — Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine — threat is not academic. It’s memory.
For those far away — Spain, Italy, the US — Russia is a documentary event.
This difference in proximity to danger explains why:
Poland invests heavily in defence,
Finland and the Baltics are on alert,
Germany dithers,
France philosophises,
and the US oscillates between intervention and indifference.
It’s not politics.
It’s distance + memory.
VII. The United States: The Older Brother Who Can’t Decide What Role He’s Playing
The West now hinges on which America shows up:
the reliable ally?
the weary empire?
the isolationist teenager?
or the divided household we saw under Trump?
This isn’t anti-American sentiment — it’s the reality of a country struggling with its own internal temperament drift.
America has global responsibilities but domestic attention span.
Europe has global vulnerability but domestic complacency.
Together, they make a lopsided but necessary team.
VIII. The Entropical Cycle: Why the West Can’t Agree With Itself
Here’s the quiet mechanism behind Western incoherence:
The West is misaligned because its parts have lived different histories and learned different lessons.
This produces:
different temperaments
different definitions of danger
different ideas about responsibility
different tolerances for uncertainty
The result is predictably messy:
slow decisions,
inconsistent policies,
mismatched expectations,
easy exploitation by adversaries.
Russia and China don’t divide the West.
The West divides itself — naturally, inevitably, entropically.
IX. What a Realistic Realignment Would Look Like
Not utopia — just coherence.
It would require:
recognising the Northern/Central bloc as Europe’s strategic spine
reintegrating the UK
allowing France to update its identity without humiliation
expecting Southern Europe to stabilise rather than lead
preparing for American volatility
building a more equal distribution of defence responsibility
Not dramatic.
Not revolutionary.
Just sensible housekeeping.
X. Conclusion
In the end, none of this is destiny carved in granite. Civilisations don’t rise or fall because someone writes a dramatic paragraph about them — they muddle along, argue, forget things, remember them again at inconvenient moments, and generally behave like large, unruly families do.
The West isn’t doomed, and it isn’t ascending either. It’s simply itself: a collection of nations with different tempers, different histories, and different levels of enthusiasm for facing unpleasant realities. Some are alert because they’ve been kicked in the teeth by history more than they’d like. Others are relaxed because the last real danger they saw was on television, in high definition, with popcorn.
What this all adds up to is not a moral lesson or a dramatic warning, but a fairly ordinary observation:
it’s difficult to act in unison when everyone thinks the emergency is happening in someone else’s neighbourhood.
Maybe that’s the “entropical” part — if you don’t keep an eye on the past, it quietly shuffles back in through the back door, tracking mud across the carpets. Sensible people usually notice this and deal with it. Less sensible people argue about who left the door open in the first place.
Either way, the West will keep stumbling forward, occasionally tripping over its own memories and rediscovering the same old truths with great surprise. And perhaps that’s fine. As long as we notice the pattern before it bites us — and perhaps read a bit more history than is strictly comfortable — we might just avoid repeating more of it than necessary.
(And if not, well… the Nordics will have their paperwork in order, the French will have a philosophical comment ready, and the Americans will insist they saw it coming all along.)