If You’re Paying Attention and Still Not Sure What to Do
On Arnold, Yoda, and the State of the World
This is a longer piece than usual. It’s an attempt to make sense of why the current moment feels so tense, and why the stories we tell about Strength matter more than we think.
If you’re paying attention to culture right now, this is a pretty heavy moment to be responsible for…anything. A team, a family, how you show up in the world from day to day.
You don’t have to be an expert to feel it. You can sense that the world is more volatile and less forgiving than it used to be. The problems aren’t subtle. Geopolitics. Economic fragility. Climate stress. Systems that feel more wobbly than we were led to believe.
And still, when you listen to the array of solutions, something feels off, missing, or incomplete.
What makes this moment so disorienting is not that the problems are hidden. If anything, they’re pretty flippin’ obvious! What’s harder to notice though is the underlying tension that’s fueling them: the fact that we’re watching two very different myths about the meaning of Strength totally collide with each other, often without either myth actually being named.
While the same pressures are landing on all of us, what’s different is the story we each use to make sense of them…and how that story shapes what we do next.
So... let’s try to name both these myths. And what better way to do that than by using the nostalgic character archetypes of my youth (because if we’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of why things feel so weird right now, we might as well make it fun).
The 90s’ Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie Hero Myth
The first myth we’ll call “The 90s’ Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie Hero.” It’s the one that’s increasingly visible in America’s leadership right now and it begins with a pretty blunt premise: the world is becoming harsher. Cooperation is less reliable. Institutions move slowly and are widely distrusted. Volatility is the punchline.
From that starting point, its logic is straightforward. Simplify. Harden. Act early. Impose costs on others now so they aren’t imposed on you later.
Seen through this lens, a TON of recent decisions start to make sense. Pressure campaigns against places like Venezuela are more about leverage than moral posturing. Greenland isn’t so much a real estate fantasy as it is a signal that geography, resources, and chokepoints now matter again. Aggressive immigration enforcement focuses more on deterrence than on whether people see the system as fair or worth cooperating with. De-emphasizing our complex civil rights history (moments when people successfully changed policy via dissent) makes challenges to authority less visible during times of stress.
Taken in isolation, these moves all look super chaotic. Taken together, they reflect a coherent belief: in a fragile world, authority must act first, narrow the field, and accept backlash as the cost of staying ahead.
In this myth, Strength comes from both dominance and leverage. Borders matter more than norms. Control matters more than persuasion. Compliance is sufficient, even if belief erodes. The future is treated like a contest where hesitation is fatal and softness is a liability.
This myth resonates precisely because it doesn’t deny reality. It doesn’t pretend the world is kind. It doesn’t promise comfort. It promises preparedness. It’s 90s Arnold. Lots of muscle. Lots of camo. Lots of foreboding when it comes to artificial intelligence.
The Yoda-Jedi-Master-Mr.-Miyagi Myth
But there is another myth being told, albeit more quietly right now. It’s the “Yoda-Jedi-Master-Mr.-Miyagi” myth. It starts from the same diagnosis, but it reaches a different conclusion.
It agrees the world is volatile. It agrees shocks are compounding. It doesn’t pretend complexity is going away. Where it diverges is in how it fundamentally understands Strength.
This myth centers on something we’ve lost a good word for, so let’s name it with intention. Legitimacy.
Legitimacy isn’t just about being well liked or morally pure. It’s about whether people believe a system is worth participating in, even when it asks something of them (like taxes or laws). In mythic terms, legitimacy is a shared story that makes cooperation possible. It’s the kind of Strength you see in figures like Yoda or Mr. Miyagi: quiet, steady, and principled.
Legitimate systems move faster in crises because people comply without having to be coerced. They adapt better because dissent illuminates errors early. They recover more reliably because trust lowers the cost of coordinating people. In this frame, diversity, pluralism, and arguments aren’t things to tamp down. Instead, they act as a kind of sensing system. To quote the poet, M.C. Hammer, the Yoda-Jedi-Master-Mr.-Miyagi system is “too legit to quit.”
Control and Capacity are Not The Same
This difference between both these myths often gets framed as Pragmatism versus Morality. That misses the point. What’s actually at stake is a choice between control now and capacity later.
Dominance works, especially at first. The tradeoff, however, shows up over time. Fear doesn’t compound. Compliance without belief is expensive to maintain. Systems optimized for control perform well under stressors they’ve gotten used to, but kind of poorly under new ones when they inevitably pop up. When loyalty starts to outrank competence or information is hoarded, mistakes travel farther before they have a chance to be corrected.
Legitimacy, on the other hand, is Yoda energy. It’s archaic and inefficient…and then suddenly it becomes indispensable. It’s what allows societies to absorb loss without tearing themselves apart. It’s what lets organizations make hard moves without triggering internal collapse…and turn complexity from a liability into an asset.
Making Sense of the Mismatch
The uncomfortable reality is that the hardest challenges ahead aren’t clean conflicts that can be solved by force alone. They’re cascading failures, climate events, economic volatility, technological disruption, and social strain—problems that don’t care much about borders or hierarchies. In those conditions, adaptability matters more than uniformity.
The dissonance many people feel comes from sensing this mismatch. But it also comes from a third myth, a “tale as old as time” if you will (ok, last 90s reference I promise).
The myth: You must always choose between two blunt binaries.
If there is an invitation for us in any of this, it’s that we can acknowledge that the world is getting harder and still question whether narrowing our imagination, flattening our history, and thinning checks on power will actually serve us in the long run.
We can accept the failures of institutions without assuming that hollowing them out leaves anything sturdy behind when control falters.
This moment can feel like whiplash everywhere because stories told at the top of the mountain don’t stay on the mountain. They travel downward, shaping expectations along the way. For leaders, founders, and organizations, the tension shows up close to home. Many of us are stuck between reacting to pressure and articulating a coherent path forward. We feel the volatility but lack a shared language for what kind of Strength we’re actually trying to build.
In those moments, the work isn’t persuasion or performance. It’s sense making.
It’s not to choose a side in a culture war. It’s to choose which kind of Strength story we’re preparing people to live inside.
And that’s not an abstract choice. It shows up in how we lead, how we build, and how we decide what kind of future we’re rehearsing for…often long before anyone realizes it.