How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?

The (New) Sound of Music

Going Medieval

Spectacle has replaced power. It’s entertainment, unless you're at the receiving end.

How do you solve a problem like Maria?¹ We don't. We stream her, meme her, even elect her.

Maria pirouettes through protocols like a social media whiz with executive powers. She's disruptive, a little unhinged, and occasionally profound in that fortune-cookie-meets-fury way. She won't stay in the abbey; she won't stay on script. And truthfully, many of us don't want her to.

But Maria isn't the problem. She's the cheerful warm-up act.

The real problem comes cloaked in drag on reality-TV as we’re transported to an exotic location.

We've gone medieval, quite literally.

You may have seen the glowing letters to the Emperor written in fulsome prose. There's Daddy issuing royal decrees on New Pravda from his private fiefdom. Elsewhere, enemies are called Big Satan and Little Satan. There's lots of chatter about western decadence and foreign interference—the medieval shift is broadly universal. There are nobles, jesters, and crooks aplenty.

In the old days, power was personal, brutal, and divinely ordained. Today, it's algorithmic, insecure, and crowd-sourced. But the core idea remains: the emperor rules, and we all clap.

Enter Emperor Neo Zero, sovereign of the zero-sum realm. His crown is made of rare earths and gold. His sword is the CAPS LOCK key. His motto is simple: I must win, you must lose.

It is said, power corrupts. True, and absolute power entertains—if you're a spectator, that is. The opponents have adapted too. Some nod along as the monarch tweets, occasionally in French. Others perform defiance like it's the WWE—scripted conflict, real bruises, but no one actually leaves the ring.

And the rest of us? We scroll, we stare, we share, we shout into the void. This isn't politics, it's pageantry. Not governance, just content.

When shouting feels safer … than thinking

Neo Zero may shout, but listen closely—the volume conceals a void.

In Rocky IV, America enters the ring to the voice of James Brown, full of swagger and neon. Apollo Creed dances, showboats, and gets annihilated by Ivan Drago—a Soviet mountain with no rhythm but brutal efficiency. The movie was a morality play in spandex: pride, fall, reckoning.

The Cold War metaphor was obvious then. What's less obvious is that the same pattern now plays out in reverse—with more glitter and fewer ideals.

Power used to whisper; now it bellows. Not because it's sure of itself, but because it's afraid of being ignored.

This is not strength, it is performance. The grandstanding, the photo ops, the public insults. Even strong language has become normal—with Daddy's loyal scribes forced to clarify why he had to use French to make a point.

This shift from substance to spectacle isn't accidental. When leaders can no longer deliver results through traditional means, they deliver drama instead. When policy is too complicated to formulate and explain, you perform power instead of wielding it.

The audience claps nevertheless. Because even fear, when choreographed well, can feel like strength.

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Zero Sum Traps

Zero-sum thinkers see the world in terms of winning and losing, us and them.

If one person gets richer, someone else must be getting poorer.

If they’re doing well, we must be doing badly.

Jobs go either to the native born, or to foreigners.

There's no both. There's no better together. There's only: someone else is taking my share.

It wasn't meant to be this way. We were led to believe that a rising tide lifts all boats. Today, the only thing rising is suspicion.

Win-win now sounds like an outdated management slogan. Mutual gain is something we whisper after apologizing for sounding naïve.

But zero-sum thinking isn't senseless. It's a rational response to lived experience. Young people in many developed countries see the world as zero-sum because they've grown up in a slower-growth economy than their parents.

The tragedy is that we've built systems that perpetuate zero-sum situations where win-win solutions exist. Cities that don't build enough housing. Economies that don't share the spoils of growth widely. Politics that pit groups against each other for handouts.

Win/lose thinking is a trap—but it's not a mystery. We've earned it. And such thinking breeds its own politics—not left or right, but direct. Power exercised without apology, without the old rituals of legitimacy.

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The Emperor … Is Naked

Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian, once observed that America never quite knew how to handle its enormous power—so it cloaked it in virtue.

Military might was framed as moral responsibility (Iraq's WMD had to be eliminated for regional peace). Even invasions came gift-wrapped in the language of democracy and human rights. Surveillance was sold as safety ('if you have nothing to hide...').

That cloak, for America and other hegemons, has now fallen.

Across continents and ideologies, strongmen have dropped all pretense. These leaders govern not through institutions but instincts. Not through laws but loyalties. They don't justify, they simply assert.

The old dictum—if you break it, you own it—has been trashed. You can break it and walk away. No responsibilities for the day-after. Just power, exercised directly.

I think of this as the Uberization of power: minimal accountability, no baggage, surge pricing during conflict.

The irony runs deep. Back in the 1930s, just as Heisenberg was discovering the limits of certainty—the famous uncertainty principle—history was lunging toward absolute certainty. Hitler and the other tyrants weren't bothered by ambiguity. They were intoxicated by certainty. The monstrous tragedies of the 20th century didn't come from doubt, but from a refusal to doubt.

We haven't gone all the way back—not yet. But the mood music has changed.

We didn't choose to have strongmen. We auditioned for them. We offered the role to the snazziest performer and crowd-sourced the script. We get the leaders we tolerate, even celebrate.

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The New Sound of Music

And yet… despite everything… we don't deserve these wannabe rulers. Not quite, not forever. Because we've done better previously. After all, the Enlightenment followed the Middle Ages.

The Enlightenment didn't begin with revolutions. It began with routines. With pamphlets and postal routes. With strangers sharing ideas in coffeehouses and debating in drafty rooms. With the modest belief that truth could survive disagreement, and that doubt wasn't weakness—it was progress in disguise.

Progress wasn't fast, it wasn't neat. But it spread—across countries, classes, and centuries—through conversations, norms, and the slow scaffolding of trust.

It wasn't just the ideas that mattered—it was the infrastructure to challenge them. A culture that welcomed doubt, disagreement, and revision. Not perfection, but course correction.

Technology helped then—when it amplified curiosity instead of outrage. It could help again. If we remember what it's for.

We don't need to reinvent the wheel. We just need to remember how civic life rolls when people are willing to push—not in unison, but in rhythm.

Sometimes wisdom comes from the simplest voices.

In Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, Hoff learns a lesson when he tries to convince Winnie-the-Pooh to listen to the radio. Pooh asks him: Why do I need to listen to the radio to know what's going on in the world? And when the answer came—terrible news from a faraway city—he paused, then said: But the birds are still singing.

Pooh didn't mean we should look away. Only that we should also look around.

Keeping up with national and international news is important, but it's not a place for us to hang around all day. It's a place to visit briefly.

Some people have no choice, of course. Whether or not they are interested in geopolitics, geopolitics is interested in them. But most of us can choose, and perhaps we should try to focus a little more on our immediate surroundings and communities. Not only is it more pleasant, but the chance of making a positive difference to the world is much greater if we start close to home.

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🎵 Maria Returns: A (Very) Short Sequel

Years later, Maria returned. She didn't burst through the gates this time. She listened, she smiled. She still forgot her veil. She now taught the children the virtues of better together. No surprise, their music sounded even better with the chorus.

Jim Holland, Green Room, 1955: a space for building, not just consuming

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Life is a positive-sum game. If I'm wrong about this, my entire approach to life is wrong. The world is still full of opportunities for mutual benefit.

We need leaders that remind us we belong to each other. That we share more than fear. That we rise, not by winning alone, but by choosing not to cut one another down.

The Middle Ages gave us monarchs and mobs. But they also gave us cathedrals—structures built one stone at a time, by people who knew they might not live to see them finished.

That's the sound we need now. Not marching orders, not viral shouting. Just the steady rhythm of something worth building.

As Leonard Cohen whispered:

You want it darker?

We kill the flame.

Or—we don't.

How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Maria?
A flibbertigibbet
A will-o'-the-wisp
A clown

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