What holds a civilization together? What tears it apart? And what happens when we mistake the costume for the body underneath?
This pillar is about the invisible agreements that make societies function. It is about the stories cultures tell themselves, the myths they protect, and the quiet bargains people make with each other every single day without ever saying a word. Harumi does not approach civilization as a textbook topic. He approaches it the way a mechanic approaches an engine. He wants to know what is actually making the thing run. And more often than not, the answer is something no one wants to admit.
These ten teachings move through the full arc of how civilizations are born, how they behave, and how they eventually close up shop. They ask uncomfortable questions about masculinity, tourism, conformity, nostalgia, and the strange reasons young people fall in love with dead ideologies. Together, they form something like a user manual for understanding why the world looks the way it does right now.
1. Inefficiency is Essential for Humanity
Everyone agrees that waste is bad. Governments cut budgets. Companies lay off workers. Productivity apps promise to squeeze more hours out of every day. The modern world runs on one core belief: if you can do it faster and cheaper, you should.
Harumi says this is killing us slowly.
He points to sports first, because sports make the argument obvious. The UFC became unwatchable once fighters discovered that the most “efficient” path to victory was grinding opponents on the ground for fifteen minutes. The NBA turned into a three point shooting contest because analytics proved it was the optimal shot. In both cases, efficiency murdered the spectacle. The thing that made people care was the unpredictability, the wildness, the stuff that could not be reduced to a formula.
Then he zooms out. The things we actually love about being alive are all inefficient. Public parks do not generate revenue. Art serves no survival function. A city with forty different neighborhoods and a hundred languages is a logistical nightmare compared to a planned grid of identical apartments. But the messy city is the one people move to. The sterile grid is the one people flee.
His most striking example is China. While Western governments obsess over “lean” budgets and cutting “waste,” China builds infrastructure it does not yet need. Bridges to nowhere. Train stations in empty fields. Western economists call this reckless. Harumi calls it genius. Because when the demand arrives, the infrastructure is already there. The “waste” becomes resilience. The redundancy becomes wealth.
Inefficiency, he argues, is just another word for humanity. Every time we optimize something, we are shaving off the parts that make it worth doing in the first place. A perfectly efficient society would be a nightmare to live in. It would also be extraordinarily fragile, because it would have no slack, no cushion, no room to absorb a surprise.
2. The “Monoculture” Never Existed
There is a powerful story in American politics that goes like this: once upon a time, everyone shared the same values. People went to church, kids played outside, neighbors knew each other’s names. Then something went wrong. Diversity, progressivism, the internet. The culture fractured. And now we need to go back.
Harumi’s response is blunt. There was never a “back” to go to.
America was founded by thirteen colonies that did not particularly like each other. The Puritans in Massachusetts had almost nothing in common with the plantation owners in Virginia. The Dutch traders in New York wanted different things than the Quakers in Pennsylvania. From the very first day, America was a collection of disagreements held together by geography and a shared dislike of the British Crown.
The 1950s, which get held up as the golden age of American unity, were largely invented by television shows made in the 1970s. Happy Days and Leave It to Beaver reruns created a memory of a decade that most people alive at the time would not have recognized. Black Americans, women, immigrants, and anyone outside the white suburban ideal were simply edited out of the picture.
What the civil rights movement did, Harumi argues, was not create diversity. Diversity was always there. The movement simply revealed it. It forced the camera to pan wider.
This means the friction we see today is not a sign that the country is falling apart. It is the natural state of a nation that was never unified in the first place. The question was never “how do we get back to agreement?” The question is “how do we get better at disagreeing?”
3. Civilizations Should Be Viewed as “Pop Up Shops”
We talk about nations the way we talk about buildings. They are “built.” They have “foundations.” When they struggle, we say they are “crumbling.” The assumption underneath all of this language is that countries are meant to last forever, and that when they end, something has gone terribly wrong.
Harumi offers a different metaphor. Think of civilizations as pop up shops.
A pop up shop opens because the conditions are right. There is foot traffic. There is demand. The rent is affordable. It serves its purpose for a season, maybe two. And then it closes. Nobody mourns the pop up shop. Nobody says it “failed.” It simply ran its course.
He argues that the Founding Fathers of America understood this intuitively. They never expected the country to last 250 years. They built a system for their time, not for eternity. The obsession with permanence, with “saving” the system, with worrying about “what we leave our grandkids,” causes more damage than the decline itself. It leads to austerity. It leads to panic. It leads to people clinging to institutions that stopped working decades ago.
Thinkers like Oswald Spengler and Ibn Khaldun mapped the life cycles of civilizations long before modern historians. They saw the same pattern everywhere. Cultures rise with energy and purpose, mature into complexity, and eventually exhaust themselves. Everything that is born eventually dies.
The healthier approach, Harumi suggests, is gratitude. Appreciate what a civilization accomplished while it was open. Do not waste its final years in a desperate, angry attempt to keep the doors from closing. The ice cream shop closes in winter. That does not mean the ice cream was bad.
4. Modern Masculinity is “War Cosplay”
The “manosphere” has an answer for the crisis of masculinity. Lift weights. Read Marcus Aurelius. Start a business. Wake up at 5 AM. Become disciplined. Become dangerous. Become a man.
Harumi watches all of this and sees something deeply sad.
He calls modern masculinity “war cosplay.” These men are training for a battle that will never come. They are building the body of a warrior and the mindset of a Spartan, but they are real estate agents in Florida. They are software engineers in Austin. There is no war. There is no frontier. There is no community that needs them to be dangerous on its behalf.
Historically, male aggression had a function. Young men were pointed toward something larger than themselves. They fought wars. They cleared land. They built infrastructure under brutal conditions. The aggression was not good or bad. It was energy, and society gave it a direction. The man did not serve himself. He was used by his community for a higher purpose. And in that being used, he found what the old traditions called “glory.”
Modern self improvement culture has severed that connection entirely. The gym, the cold plunges, the productivity routines: all of it is pointed inward. The man is building himself for himself. And Harumi argues that this is exactly why it feels empty. You cannot find glory in a mirror. Glory requires being needed by something outside of you.
The result is men who are, as Harumi puts it, revving a bigger and bigger engine in a car that is not going anywhere. The noise is impressive. The horsepower is real. But the vehicle is parked. And deep down, the driver knows it.
5. Colonialism Was a “Release Valve” for Bored Young Men
Most explanations of colonialism focus on economics. Nations wanted resources, markets, strategic advantage. Harumi does not dispute any of that. But he thinks there is a layer underneath the economics that nobody wants to talk about.
Young men were bored.
Picture a village in England in the 1800s. It is cold. It is gray. You are twenty years old. You have no prospects. The local economy offers you a life of repetitive labor and early death. And then someone hands you a pamphlet. “See the world. Serve the Crown. Go somewhere warm.”
Harumi argues that colonial armies and trading companies functioned as a “release valve” for what he calls “excess male energy.” Europe had more young men than it knew what to do with. These men were not ideologues. Most of them could not have found Africa on a map. They were simply looking for something to do. Something that felt bigger than their miserable village. Something that let them act like “big shots” for a while.
This does not excuse colonialism. Nothing excuses the violence and exploitation that followed. But it does reframe the question. If you understand that societies must always find something for young men between sixteen and twenty five to do, then colonialism starts to look less like a grand strategy and more like a pressure release. The empire gave restless boys a direction. Without it, that energy would have turned inward and torn the home country apart.
The uncomfortable implication for today is obvious. We have run out of colonies. We have run out of large scale wars. And we have a generation of young men with nowhere to point their energy. Harumi suggests that until we solve this problem honestly, we will keep seeing the symptoms everywhere: online radicalization, conspiracy theories, random acts of destruction. The engine is still running. We just took away the road.
6. Tourism is Inferior to “Staying Put”
Travel is sacred in modern culture. Your Instagram bio says “wanderlust.” Your dating profile says you want someone who loves “adventures.” The assumption is that traveling makes you a more interesting, more cultured, more complete person. Staying home is for boring people.
Harumi disagrees completely.
He argues that tourism is mostly just “looking at stuff.” You stand in front of the Eiffel Tower. You take a photo. You eat a croissant. You go home. What did you learn? You learned what the Eiffel Tower looks like in person, which is more or less what it looks like in every photograph ever taken. The croissant was good. That is the entire experience.
Real culture, Harumi says, is not built by visitors. It is built by people who stick around. The local who opens a bakery in a boring Midwestern town and runs it for thirty years is doing more cultural work than the digital nomad who spends two weeks in Lisbon and writes a blog post about “finding themselves.” Culture is not a spectacle you consume. It is a thing you build slowly, through obligation, repetition, and roots.
He draws a sharp line between the “seer” and the “local.” The tourist is an audience member. The tourist watches. The local is the one actually performing the act of living. And the performance only works because the local did not leave. The local stayed through the boring parts, the hard winters, the years when nothing interesting happened. That commitment is what created the thing the tourist flew six-thousand miles to photograph.
The implication is a critique of the entire “digital nomad” and “wanderlust” lifestyle. Depth and meaning come from roots and obligation. They come from the willingness to be bored in the same place for a very long time. Buying a sandwich in a foreign country is not a personality.
7. Confucianism Equates Intelligence with Morality
In the West, we accept the idea of the “evil genius.” A person can be brilliant and terrible at the same time. Intelligence and morality are two separate tracks. You can max out one and completely neglect the other.
Harumi explains that in the Confucian world, this concept does not exist.
In the Confucian “operating system,” which shaped China, Korea, Japan, and much of East Asia for over two thousand years, intelligence and virtue are the same thing. To be truly smart is to be good. To be good is to be smart. The imperial examination system, which determined who would govern China for centuries, was designed around this principle. The exams tested memorization of classical texts, obedience to tradition, and the ability to reproduce orthodox ideas with precision.
The system selected for conformity. The man who could perfectly recite the Analects of Confucius was considered not just knowledgeable but morally superior. He had demonstrated that he could subordinate his own ideas to the wisdom of the ancients. And that act of subordination was itself the proof of his virtue.
Harumi argues that this cultural DNA persists today. The intense academic pressure in East Asian households is not simply a parenting style. It is a civilizational imperative. When a parent pushes a child to get perfect test scores, they are not just chasing a good college. They are enacting a two thousand year old belief that academic excellence is moral excellence. The child who does their homework is, in this framework, literally becoming a better person.
This also explains, Harumi suggests, why East Asian cultures have historically produced fewer “rock and roll” rebels. Rebellion requires believing that your own original thought is more valuable than the inherited wisdom of the group. In a Confucian system, that belief is not just wrong. It is immoral.
8. The Nostalgia for “Third Places” is Fake
Every few months, a viral post appears online. “We need third places!” someone writes. A third place is a social space that is not your home and not your work. A coffee shop. A park. A library. A barbershop. The argument is that capitalism has destroyed these spaces, and that is why everyone is so lonely.
Harumi thinks this is nonsense.
He asks a simple question: what third places, exactly, are you nostalgic for? The mall? Malls were fluorescent lit corridors of chain stores where teenagers wandered around because there was literally nothing else to do. The town square? Most American towns never had a functioning town square. The local bar? Most people did not go to bars to build community. They went to bars to drink.
The irony, Harumi points out, is that the best third place in modern history was created by capitalism. Starbucks invented the concept of a place where you could sit for hours, pay four dollars for a coffee, and not be asked to leave. Before Starbucks, there were almost no accessible public spaces where an ordinary person could just exist without spending significant money or having a specific reason to be there.
So what actually happened? It is not that third places disappeared. It is that people stopped wanting to use them. The smartphone gave everyone an infinite source of stimulation in their pocket. Physical reality, with its awkward silences and slow conversations and boring Tuesday afternoons, simply could not compete. People are not lonely because the coffee shop closed. People are lonely because they are sitting in the coffee shop staring at their phone.
The nostalgia for third places is, Harumi argues, a way of blaming architecture for a problem that lives in our nervous systems. We have been trained by technology to find the real world intolerable. No amount of urban planning can fix that.
9. Communism is a “Fandom” and Aesthetic for Youth
When a twenty year old college student puts a hammer and sickle in their social media bio, the usual responses are predictable. Conservatives say the universities have been infiltrated by Marxists. Liberals say young people are responding to genuine economic inequality. Everyone treats it as a serious political statement.
Harumi treats it as fandom.
He argues that young people are drawn to communism for the same reasons they are drawn to Star Wars or Marvel. It has incredible aesthetics. The uniforms are sharp. The berets look cool. The iconography is bold and instantly recognizable. And the “lore” is endlessly deep. You can spend years reading Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and still feel like you have barely scratched the surface. It is a cinematic universe with real historical events as its episodes.
Capitalism, by contrast, offers nothing to belong to. There is no capitalism uniform. There is no capitalism anthem. Capitalism actively encourages isolation and competition. It tells you to be an individual, which is a terrible pitch to a nineteen year old who desperately wants to be part of a group.
Communism offers an “all in” lifestyle brand. You get a reading list, a vocabulary, a community, an enemy, and a sense that you are part of something larger than yourself. It is, in Harumi’s framing, the ultimate group project. And young people love group projects because the alternative is sitting alone in your apartment wondering what you are supposed to be doing with your life.
The implication is that most youth radicalism is not really radical at all. It is a hobby. It is a phase. It will fade the way all phases fade, slowly and then all at once, as the realities of rent and bureaucracy wear down the revolutionary spirit. The beret ends up in a drawer. The Das Kapital stays on the shelf, unfinished.
10. Japan’s Order Relies on “Shared Shame”
Americans love Japan. They love the clean streets. They love the quiet trains. They love the politeness, the precision, the sense that everything works exactly the way it is supposed to. And then they come home and ask: why can’t we have this?
Harumi’s answer is simple. You do not want to pay the price.
Japan’s order is not the result of good infrastructure or smart policy. It is the result of intense, unrelenting social pressure. Every Japanese person, Harumi explains, lives with a constant awareness of how their behavior appears to others. Shame is not a punishment in Japan. It is the operating system. You do not litter because everyone would see you litter. You do not speak loudly on the train because everyone would hear you. You do not deviate because deviation is visible, and visibility is painful.
This is what Harumi calls “shared shame.” It works because everyone participates. The system holds together not through laws or police but through the collective agreement that standing out is worse than any punishment a court could deliver. The individual exists in service to the group’s comfort. Personal expression is not forbidden, exactly, but it is confined to very specific, pre approved spaces.
American culture is the precise opposite. America celebrates the “main character.” The person who is loudest, most visible, most unapologetically themselves is the hero of the American story. This is wonderful for creativity, for innovation, for art. It is terrible for public trains.
You cannot import Japanese results without importing Japanese conformity. You cannot have clean streets and also have a culture that celebrates doing whatever you want. The “decay” of American public spaces, Harumi argues, is not a policy failure. It is the direct and predictable cost of prioritizing individual expression over collective shame. Americans looked at the price tag of Japanese order, and whether they realized it or not, they decided it was too expensive.
These ten teachings trace the invisible architecture of civilization. From the paradox of efficiency to the price of public order, they reveal the same underlying truth: every culture is a set of trade offs. There are no free lunches. The things we admire in other societies come bundled with costs we may not be willing to pay. And the things we complain about in our own society are often the direct consequences of freedoms we refuse to give up. Harumi does not tell you which trade off is correct. He simply insists that you see the trade off clearly, with both eyes open, before you decide what kind of world you want to live in.
Jack Maguire 