Back from the Brink: How Societies Recover
Context with Brad Harris
Can fractured societies pull themselves back from the brink? Is America doomed to slide into another civil war? Or, are we already engaged in a kind of Cold Civil War? In this episode of Context, we examine three powerful case studies of recovery: England emerging from the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century West Germany rising from the rubble of 1945 America clawing its way out of the malaise of the 1970s Each story reveals how societies that seemed broken beyond repair found ways to discipline elites, renew their principles, and restore confidence in themselves and in the future. As...
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Good vs Evil
Context with Brad Harris
My thoughts on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and what his martyrdom reveals about truth versus lies, good versus evil, and the West's spiritual fight for its life.
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The Wilderness at the Gates
Context with Brad Harris
For fifty years, we’ve been told that nature is fragile — a porcelain Eden, easily shattered by the slightest human pressure. But history tells a different story. From the fall of Rome to the Black Death, from Chernobyl to Detroit, every time people retreat, the wilderness rushes back with astonishing speed. In this episode, we examine the reality that civilization is fragile while life on Earth is ferociously tenacious. Drawing on historians like Bryan Ward-Perkins and William Cronon, and ecologists like C.S. Holling, we discover how fast forests and animals can reclaim human spaces, and...
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Phantom Worlds
Context with Brad Harris
History is full of phantom worlds—alternative technological paradigms that could have made everything turn out radically differently. Airships instead of airplanes. Rail instead of cars. Direct current instead of alternating current. Telegraphs instead of telephones. Each path once seemed inevitable, until another won out and reshaped civilization. In this episode of Context, we explore these turning points and what they reveal about our own moment, when autonomous vehicles and immersive virtual reality are racing forward in parallel. Will the future be built on radical mobility, or radical...
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The Machinery of Abundance
Context with Brad Harris
Modern life runs on hidden engine rooms—vast, intricate systems most of us never see. The Haber-Bosch process, which turns air into fertilizer, is one of them. It feeds billions, yet almost no one outside of science or industry could explain how it works or why it matters. In this episode, we explore Haber-Bosch not just as a technological marvel, but as a parable for our dependence on complex systems most of us barely understand. From the fight over bird droppings in the 19th century to the industrial alchemy of fixing nitrogen, we trace how human ingenuity transformed the limits of nature,...
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When We Were Most Human
Context with Brad Harris
The modern world is defined by acceleration. But what if the most stable—and perhaps most human—version of ourselves existed long before civilization? In this episode, we explore the world of the Cro-Magnon: anatomically modern humans who thrived in Ice Age Europe. For hundreds of generations, their way of life remained remarkably unchanged. What was it like to live in near-perfect evolutionary harmony with the environment? Civilization ultimately emerged as a hedge against danger, especially for those with children to protect. But in exchange for safety and surplus, we surrendered...
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The History of the Future
Context with Brad Harris
Why did we stop believing in utopia? By the late 19th century, many Americans had come to believe that the future would be defined by peace, prosperity, and moral progress. But over the next century, optimism gave way to fear—war, nuclear weapons, and runaway technology began to reshape our vision of what was possible. In this episode of Context, we explore how our ideas about the future have evolved—from Edward Bellamy’s best-seller Looking Backward (1888), to H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1933), to The Terminator series (1984), and finally to Brian Christian’s The...
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The Meaning of War
Context with Brad Harris
Is it possible that war, for all its horror, once played a vital role in human flourishing—and that its disappearance has left a cultural and spiritual void? In this episode, we explore the provocative thesis that war has historically served not only as an engine of destruction, but as a forge for meaning and social cohesion. Drawing on J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors, with insight from William James, Nietzsche, and Durkheim, we examine what modern society loses when it loses war—not just as a military phenomenon, but as a psychological and cultural one. What happens to masculinity...
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The Decline of the West: Oswald Spengler’s Prophetic Vision
Context with Brad Harris
A century ago, Oswald Spengler warned that Western civilization was entering its final phase—not from war or catastrophe, but from cultural exhaustion. In The Decline of the West, he argued that every great society passes through organic stages of growth and decay—and the West, he claimed, had already entered winter. In this episode of Context, we revisit Spengler’s audacious and unsettling vision. We explore the patterns he identified—technocracy, Caesarism, the erosion of civic virtue—and ask whether Spengler’s predictions still hold up. Are we watching a great civilization...
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Narrative Warfare: How National Stories Shape Geopolitics
Context with Brad Harris
We often think global power is all about armies and technology. But what if the most decisive battles are fought through stories? In this episode of Context, we explore the concept of narrative warfare—the battle over how nations interpret their past, define their identity, and imagine their future. From Manifest Destiny to the 1619 Project, from China’s “Century of Humiliation” to Russia’s myth of the “Third Rome,” we examine how national stories shape the world order—and what happens when a superpower like America stops believing in its own. Support the show and access...
info_outlineWhy did we stop believing in utopia?
By the late 19th century, many Americans had come to believe that the future would be defined by peace, prosperity, and moral progress. But over the next century, optimism gave way to fear—war, nuclear weapons, and runaway technology began to reshape our vision of what was possible.
In this episode of Context, we explore how our ideas about the future have evolved—from Edward Bellamy’s best-seller Looking Backward (1888), to H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1933), to The Terminator series (1984), and finally to Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem (2020). Along the way, we trace the rise of techno-utopianism, the shock of dystopian realism, and the ethical dilemmas now posed by artificial intelligence.
The history of the future has never mattered more.
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