Andrew A. Hennessy 🍞

People always ask me why I'm so optimistic about the West. A few weeks ago, I told a friend I'd never been more bullish on our future. He looked at me like I'd lost my mind. So I gave him two predictions. First: the EU, as it exists today, is going to collapse. Second: we are going to hold a Nuremberg trial for communism. Not for people. For ideas. Because those ideas are still the ones killing us today. Then I explained why. There's one law I've watched play out everywhere, in startups, in family fortunes, in empires: The more a system is full of money and empty of intelligence, the faster it decays. Take the simplest example. The son or daughter of a billionaire who inherited the money but not the education that came with it. They become parasites on what their parents built. They don't understand what they're running. But they're surrounded by courtiers telling them they're brilliant, so they feel invincible. And they start breaking things, one confident decision at a time. That's the West's ruling class right now. And here's the part people miss: a decadent system with no intelligence left doesn't slowly drift. It collapses. Because it can't stop making mistakes, and every mistake is bigger than the last. Here's what that looks like in practice. In 2024, Marc Andreessen sat down with officials from the Biden administration. By his account, they told him not to bother funding AI startups. AI would be a game for two or three giant companies, working hand in hand with the government. When he pointed out that AI is just math, they told him that during the Cold War they classified entire branches of physics, and they could do the same with the math behind AI. Think about who they said that to. The man who wrote "Software is eating the world." The man who understood decades ago that whatever the state gets its hands on, it ruins. Nobody with a functioning brain walks into a room with Marc Andreessen and says that. Those people did. With total confidence. And now, this week: Donald Tusk. Police surrounding Poland's Constitutional Tribunal. Government-backed judges declaring the chief justice suspended. All of it on a Friday evening, while the elected president was on a plane to Senegal, forced to turn around and fly back to Warsaw. When you're winning the argument, you don't send the police to the courthouse. This is what decadence looks like up close. Endless money. Zero feedback from reality. High on their own supply. Surrounded by people who will never tell them no. Systems like that don't reform. They break. So yes, people find me optimistic. This is why. I'm not betting on these people fixing anything. I'm betting on what gets built after they've finished breaking it.