Building on my recent musings about why the West so persistently misreads the Third World, a deeper layer emerges when you consider how “modernity” actually takes hold in these societies. The West congratulates itself on exporting universities, satellites, skyscrapers, and democratic institutions, assuming these shiny imports will automatically produce rational, high-trust, self-correcting civilizations. They don’t. What you usually get is second-hand modernity—technological competence layered on top of pre-modern minds that never absorbed the philosophical and moral substrate that made the original Western version work.
Engineers who can launch rockets still consult astrologers before signing contracts. Elite graduates solve differential equations by day and perform rituals by night without seeing any contradiction. Institutions are copied in form but operate through nepotism, bribery, and short-term expediency. Corruption isn’t a bug; it’s the rational response when moral integration is missing. The result is not a developing society—it’s a fragile hybrid: advanced enough to look impressive on paper, but psychologically and culturally still tribal. It oscillates between imitation and impulse, never quite achieving the internalized restraint and long-term coherence that true modernity requires.
The West keeps projecting its own historical experience onto places where the Enlightenment never happened internally. We send aid, build infrastructure, and celebrate GDP ticks while missing the deeper dislocation: these societies are neither tribal nor modern. They’re something far more unstable in between.
Read the full essay at Counter-Currents →
On Investments
Irving Resources (IRV; $0.275) just put out news that, to my eyes, is the most important update in years for the company. The essence of the release is the cryptic feeder-style mineralization vaguely mentioned in the two recent holes at Omu Sinter—hydrothermal breccias, veining, and intense silicification that the geologists (including Dr. Quinton Hennigh) interpret as proximal to the actual feeder system that built the large sinter body itself. Assays are still weeks away, but the style is exactly what you want to see in a high-sulfidation epithermal system. They’re already talking about a possible connection to the high-grade gold-silver hit 800 m north from 2019 and are applying for expanded drill permits. This feels like the project is finally starting to reveal its real potential.
Their last financing is coming free-trading soon (the units from the February 2026 placement hit the four-month hold period around early June). I would look for weakness to buy. With the stock still trading at a modest market cap and the market largely ignoring this development, the setup looks asymmetric.
Full disclosure (and yes, conflict of interest): I am one of the largest shareholders in IRV. I was also on the board of the earlier version of the company from which IRV is effectively a spinoff/reorganization, and I have advised them in the past. And, why on earth would I be writing positively about it here if I weren’t already heavily invested? If I weren’t invested, I’d probably still be excited about it… But I wouldn’t be writing about it publicly.
Jayant Bhandari
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