Kings, Cronies & Legacies of Conquest

Greetings,

This transmission comes as a Q4 addendum having just wrapped up UNGA80 and Transformative Impact Summit in NYC, followed by the No Kings rally in Denver—all within a month. The combination, both in place and purpose, surfaced a deep reckoning and reflection that wasn’t going to wait for the new year.

As always, if what follows resonates, please reach out. None of us are as wise as all of us! The work that’s needed is urgent, and now more than ever I’m convinced that partnership is the new leadership.

The great Lakota “Horse Nation” once ruled the plains. Long after the Spanish brought horses northward, Great Plains tribes like the Lakota People built an equestrian empire, mastering the ecology of the grassy flatland. Famous Oglala leaders (and fellow wanderers) like Rain-in-the-Face exemplify that culture: swift, skilled, and free-ranging. Having grown up in the foothills of Colorado, I’ve long felt kinship with these people. On horse and foot, the Lakota outmatched rival tribes and encroaching colonial powers. For a time, the plains belonged to the horse and the hopeful.

Yet even a proud riding society couldn’t survive the sweeping wave of an industrial juggernaut. The U.S. Cavalry, unable to best the Lakota directly, adopted a cruel and less direct strategy: drive the plains Indians into poverty by destroying their mobility and food supply (like a western Harrying of the North—a scorched earth replay eight centuries later). Railroads and repeating rifles turned buffalo hunting into big business and savage sabotage. By 1870, the bison population—once tens of millions strong—was being hunted by the hundreds of thousands. Every buffalo dead, is an Indian gone.

At that time, a buffalo hide fetched about $3.50, and a round of ammunition $0.25. One hunter dryly noted that, at those prices, “every time I fired one I got my investment back twelve times over.” The depression of 1873 only worsened the frenzy—buffalo were slow-grazing, four-legged bank rolls, and when money dried up the market it seemed only natural to cash in and keep moving.

Railroads made mass slaughter easy and graphic. Soldiers and tourists alike shot buffalo from moving trains as casually as clay pigeons. As a Smithsonian historian reports, General Philip Sheridan openly cheered on the hunters, insisting privately that “these men have done more in the last two years to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years.” The goal was obvious: destroy the Indians’ commissary. Sheridan even urged legislators to keep supplying powder and lead and “let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated” —only then, he said, could the plains be opened up to (the far less majestic) cattle. By the 1880s the result was clear and irreversible: where 30–60 million bison once thundered, fewer than 300 survived. The Lakota’s ability to feed, clothe and trade from the bison was shattered as completely as their freedom to roam as a people.

And in the place of free-run herds rose ranches, farms, mines and rail lines—the hallmarks of a new industrial order. The buffalo bones became flex pieces, fertilizer and parade fodder. By century’s end, most plains tribes were confined to reservations, their old world literally fenced off by barbed wire. The U.S. effort had succeeded. Once-sacred prairies were now surveyed territory, and the Lakota empire lay in ruins. What had been an agile, free culture was ground up beneath the rails and rifles of an industrial superpower.

Lessons for Today

The North American story of the Lakota (and many other great tribes and civilisations lost to history) teaches us that energy, technology and adaptability dictate the fates of societies. Its heroes and villains do not map neatly onto our own political landscape. But when we look in the mirror of history, unsettling parallels emerge. If we force a metaphor: the isolationist, #drillbabydrill MAGA types resemble our modern Lakota—empowered by nostalgia and old certainties, clinging to their oil rigs and faith in muscle milk. The rising power is the great financial wall of Wall Street (ironically), along with a single-party state in Beijing. Chinese factories with their relentless, robotic, lightless assembly lines give us a taste of how an opponent with near-limitless energy and speed can outflank a complacent culture. As Ford CEO Jim Farley warned, “we are in a global competition with China… and if we lose this, we do not have a future.”  When your competitor drills down to the richest gold deposits (a recent Chinese discovery may hold 1,100 tons) and monopolizes robots and AI, complacency can be fatal… not right, reasonable or moral, but fatal nonetheless.

Let’s consider six broad lessons…

Complex Systems & Energy Dependencies

The Lakota story is a vivid case of emergent complexity: countless unpredictable forces (hat fashions, epidemics, revolts, gold rushes, innovations) combined to reshape an entire continent in ways no one foresaw.  Crucially, sustaining that complexity requires immense energy inputs. The Lakota tapped the annual “photosynthetic bounty” of the prairie—the energy equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs per year in tall-grass biomass—and for a century they outpaced or matched every foe on their terms. But the U.S. then unlocked fossil-fuel vaults (coal + oil) whose energy dwarfed that of the plains, accelerating industrial growth far beyond any Native opponent. This pattern is not ancient history; it echoes today in China’s massive push into fusion and renewables. The moment the energy inputs stop, a complex system collapses. When the buffalo (solar-derived mass) vanished, the horse empire collapsed, despite its cultural strengths. In the same way, if an industrial civilization can no longer pump in energy (say, from cheap oil or stable supply chains), its intricate edifices and conveniences disintegrate.

Climbing the Energy Ladder

History is a ladder of energy regimes. Early plains societies ran on local biomass cycles (sunlight, wood, buffalo, etc). The Iroquois and others gained a temporary edge by trading for European metal goods and alcohol—a transatlantic energy/material infusion that stressed traditional economies. The Lakota next ascended by mastering the horse–buffalo niche, tapping the rich solar energy stored in prairie grasses to power an unrivaled mounted, 4-legged culture. But each step up (horsepower vs. footpower, coal vs. wood) dramatically multiplies a society’s capabilities. The U.S. then unlocked dense carbon: coal-fired steel mills, rifles, steam locomotives and telegraphs. It used near-surface coal and petroleum (energy millions of years in the making) to rewrite the rules of engagement. Each of these jumps, from muscle to fossil fuel, from mechanical tools to mass-produced weapons, delivered exponential advantage. Groups that failed to make the leap fell behind, no matter how well-adapted they were prior. If your group does not climb to reach that new energy rung, history shows, it will be at a structural disadvantage to those who do.

Adaptability vs. Entrenchment

Those societies with less to lose often adapt faster. The nomadic Lakota had less fixed wealth than, say, the sedentary Mandan farmers, and thus embraced the horse innovation more eagerly, outpacing their farming neighbors. By contrast, civilized farmers and pueblo peoples initially viewed the horse warily, clinging to bipedalism and plows… and paid the price as they were overrun by warriors on horseback. In the modern world, this suggests that the most flexible (even radical) players (tech startups, smaller nations, insurgent ideologies, perhaps even network states) may thrive over ossified incumbents. Adapt or die became the Great Plains mantra. Every era’s dominant powers seem slowest to see the next paradigm shift. We’d do well to remember: the incumbent rarely leads the next revolution.

The Fragility of Convenience

A paradox of advanced technology is that it often democratizes usage while eroding traditional skills (sound familiar?). The Lakota horseman riding buffalo was a consummate athlete; conversely, a city slicker on a train needed little skill to shoot buffalo from a moving car. Lighting an oil lamp required far less knowledge than starting a wood fire with a bow drill. As we pack the world with “material culture” (i.e. gadgets and tools), we get a society where everyone can push buttons, but few understand deeper fundamentals. This makes culture fragile: if the power grid or satellites fail, most would be utterly lost, having traded practical know-how for convenience. Our own society risks infantilization by handing off complexity to machines. The same technology that democratizes can disempower. We should train as if the industrial train might break down. Otherwise, like those pistol-waving tourists, we will be helpless if our tools stop working. This paradox is our inheritance as we rely on smartphones and AI, we cede fundamental Human Layers. We must guard the knowledge of how our world actually works, or modern life becomes brittle the moment the wires fry… and rest assured, all wires, in due time, will fry.

Absolute vs. Relative Growth

The Lakota success was amazing but short-lived in relative terms. On an absolute scale they had done what no one had for 10,000 years—married horse and midwest ecology to dominate enemies and be kings. Yet “relative” to the American industrial surge, they were gradually, then suddenly falling behind. The U.S. bent time and space to its will: coal-fired railroads could cross states in days, telegraphs in minutes, armies in weeks. Every step—steam trains over horses, steel muskets over bows, mountain mines over sacred hills—widened the gap. Even as the Lakota achieved unmatched mastery of the plains, U.S. engineers quietly emptied the bank of the ancient solar vault (fossil fuels) beneath their feet. Steel engines (coal) outpaced the finest horses (grass), steamboats (wood and coal) eclipsed riverboats (only wood), rifles (gunpowder) trumped bows. The takeaway? In an arms race of complexity, it’s not enough to be brilliant—one must out-innovate the innovator. The Americans took “The Commons” (bison, timber, minerals) and fed it into a global industrial market no Native society could match, overwhelming everyone by sheer resource throughput. History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes. What was once bison and timber is now bandwidth and lithium—new commons, same insatiable hunger. The frontier has shifted from soil to silicon, but the logic endures: feed the digital supremacy machine faster than your rival, or be fed to it.

Obligate Adaptation

Perhaps the most haunting lesson is that adaptation is obligatory. In biology, creatures that fail to meet the new normal simply disappear (we have cyanobacteria snug up against ocean vents as reminders). Cultural evolution works similarly. After the Ice Age, hunter-gatherers could have stayed glorious and wild, but agrarian empires didn’t ask for permission to conquor. The Lakota could theoretically refuse farming or fences, but in a continent now partitioned by plows and rails, that was not a choice. They negotiated every imaginable compromise (treaties, trade, moving camps, adopting farming), yet the one radical shift they couldn’t envision (the industrial fossil fuel economy) was what ultimately gave their opponent the fatal edge. Bravery and wisdom and resilience (heroic traits we admire above all else) were simply no match for a deluge of “concentrated starlight” (coal) powering machine guns and locomotives.

Today we face our own obligate adaptations. It might once have seemed absurd to edit our children’s genes or implant chips in brains, yet will our descendants pity us for shunning what they’ll take for granted? To resist genetic or neural “upgrades” may soon seem as quixotic as refusing to plant fields. Likewise, as AI exponentiates, we may fear an arms race that threatens civilization, but what if it’s hesitation that dooms us to economic irrelevance?  We can attempt an ethical “drawdown” of consumption, but on a finite planet, major emitters will surely ramp up if others do not. Any voluntary slowdown might be interpreted as surrender.

We stand, like the long-fallen Lakota before us, at a vast threshold: from fossil fuels to renewables and beyond. We need not fear change when not changing seems the clear and obvious enemy. In this, other cultures offer a sobering perspective. As anthropologist Wade Davis argues in The Wayfinders, each traditional society is a unique solution to living on Earth—not a failed draft of our culture. We see their pinnacles (and their losses) because we still understand beauty and meaning. It is on us to defend those achievements when change rains supreme.

In the end, survival may hinge on one last adaptation: safeguarding Integrity—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. We champion and mourn human culture because we uniquely value those things. William F. Buckley once quipped that a conservative is “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.”  Perhaps today, beyond party labels, we should all be shouting Stop… not to halt progress altogether, but to steer it wisely away from kings and cronies and towards a legacy that just might persists. After ten thousand years of forward momentum, we’ve arrived at the cliff’s edge. Will we push the pedal to the floor and hope to soar the gap or will we pause, assess our tools and values, and build a bridge together?

This is the meta-ethical imperative of our time—a recognition that only through truth-telling at every layer (personal, technological, systemic) can we begin to heal the fracture between human and machine, self and system, truth and myth. Whatever we choose will determine our fate—not just for our generation, but for all we’ve tayken prior and all who follow. The West was forged by steel, gunpowder, and relentless energy. Its future may yet be forged by wisdom, foresight, and the courage to adapt… differently.

Cue the age of candour…
when mirrors outnumber screens,
when data hums with empathy,
and systems confess their sins.
When the algorithm dreams of rain,
when finance forgets its teeth,
and the sleepless machine finally remembers
the pulse it came from.

When we look up from the grid
and see the stars blinking back,
ancient and unimpressed.

We will laugh then,
ragged, holy, half-mad—
knowing the future was never code,
it was courage.
And we were never its users,
but its makers.