Modern people—especially the university-educated—live under a powerful illusion: they believe societies can be transformed in a generation or two through technology, education, and new institutions.

In my latest essay for Counter-Currents, I explain why this view is fundamentally mistaken. Civilizations do not change on the timescale of political reforms or economic cycles. They change over centuries and millennia. The deep moral, psychological, and cultural foundations that hold a civilization together are formed slowly, and they are extremely resistant to rapid alteration.