The Default We’re Forgetting

 Jeremy Boreing’s latest monologue, Hasan Piker and Candace Owens Are Selling You Third-World Thinking, is one of the clearest things he’s done. He starts with two trials running at the same time in America and uses the distance between them to measure how far we’ve drifted from what made the West different in the first place.

One trial is in a courtroom in Provo, Utah. Prosecutors spent months building a case the hard way: eyewitnesses, security footage, forensics, DNA, handwriting, the actual rifle. Rules bind everyone. The accused is presumed innocent. Evidence has to survive cross-examination. It is slow, adversarial, and impersonal. That process is not natural. It is the product of centuries of deliberate cultural work.

The other “trial” happens behind a podcast mic. There is no judge, no burden of proof, no fixed standard of evidence. Verdicts arrive by likes and shares. Narratives shift week to week. Gossip and social proof do the work that evidence used to do. Boreing points at Candace Owens’ treatment of the Charlie Kirk case as the clearest current example on the right, and at Hasan Piker’s cheerful defense of theft as “collection on a debt” as the left’s version. Different aesthetics. Same underlying operating system.

You can watch Boreing's monologue here: [VIDEO]

What Boreing Means by Third-World Thinking

Cross-cultural researchers distinguish guilt-innocence cultures from honor-shame cultures. The West, at its best, runs on the first: an objective moral code that applies to everyone, justice that is supposed to be blind, and the claim that outranks the man making it. Most of the world runs on the second. Worth is issued by the watching group and can be revoked by it. An unanswered insult is a kind of social death. The sneer is not a failure of argument; in that framework, the sneer is the argument. Tribal loyalty and blood frequently rank above abstract justice.

Boreing’s sharpest point is that third-world thinking is not primarily a foreign import. It is the human default—the water most of our species has always swam in. Western civilization is the weird exception. It had to be built. The medieval Church’s ban on cousin marriage helped dissolve the clan and create the individual as a meaningful unit. Impersonal exchange—fixed prices, enforceable contracts, honest weights—replaced the natural human preference for haggling, favoritism, and clan advantage. John Adams defended the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre because he thought the truth was owed even to the enemy of his own people. That choice cost him half his law practice. It was not normal. It was a decision to prioritize something higher than tribe.

Kick out the scaffolding of Christian virtue, rule of law, and impersonal institutions, and the older pattern returns. Social media accelerates it by rewarding dominance displays over careful argument. Mass low-skill immigration from honor-shame societies imports the pattern demographically. Parts of the political class on both sides increasingly treat it as sophistication rather than regression.

Shapiro’s Earlier Diagnosis

This is the same phenomenon Ben Shapiro diagnosed earlier this summer in his episode on the race to the fringes. Shapiro defined Third Worldism as wokeness applied to the entire globe. Domestic wokeness treated every unequal outcome inside America as proof the system was rigged. Third Worldism makes the identical claim internationally: every failure in the Global South is the direct result of Western exploitation. Western success is not the product of better institutions, culture, governance, or choices. It is permanent moral debt for colonialism and “empire.”

Once that frame is accepted, the politics follow. Borders become tools of oppression. Support for Israel becomes settler-colonialism. Criticism of Havana, Beijing, or Tehran is dismissed as Western propaganda. The solution is never better governance in failing countries. It is the transfer of power, moral authority, and demographic weight from the West to those who claim to speak for the “exploited.” You hear it in DSA-aligned candidates arguing America needs more officeholders from the Global South so the country can finally “reckon” with its history. You see it in influencers who defend Mao while treating anti-Western “resistance” movements as inherently righteous regardless of body counts.

Shapiro’s larger observation was that this ideology is no longer confined to campus seminars. Parts of the Democratic Party’s rising class have absorbed it. The older language of equal opportunity is being displaced by civilizational indictment. And he warned that the right has its own version of the race to the fringes—soft defenses of predatory figures, aesthetic toughness that excuses real predation, the elevation of tribe and dominance over the unglamorous work of defending institutions that actually produce prosperity and liberty.

The Connection

Boreing and Shapiro are describing the same thing from different altitudes.

Shapiro focuses on the ideological superstructure: a theory of moral agency that denies people and nations outside the West are full authors of their own outcomes. Everything bad is downstream of someone else’s power. That frame pairs easily with revolutionary talk because if the problem is external and permanent, internal reform is pointless. Only rupture will do. The contemporary Western version is largely a product of Western self-loathing. It offers activists a way to feel radical without having to build functioning institutions, and it gives political entrepreneurs a grievance that never has to be resolved.

Boreing digs into the cultural substrate underneath. Third Worldism works because it resonates with the human default. The left sells the transaction-as-theft version (“take yours back”). Parts of the post-liberal right sell the tribe-as-the-point version (“reward friends and punish enemies”). Both roads lead to the same place: the pre-Western pattern in which status is settled by display of dominance rather than by evidence, and in which the individual is secondary to the group’s honor.

The physical walls at the border are not the only ones crumbling. The walls in the mind—the ones that kept the default at bay—are cracking too. Social media, elite self-hatred, and demographic change are all accelerating the reversion. The West did not invent tribal loyalty, blood over justice, or social proof over truth. Our own ancestors lived by those rules. The achievement was learning to overcome them.

Agency or Grievance

This is not mainly an immigration argument, though immigration is part of it. It is an argument about what kind of people we are choosing to become. A society that treats fixed prices, blind justice, and the individual as moral agents as optional luxuries will not keep the prosperity and liberty those practices produced. A politics that externalizes every failure and treats agency as a colonial fiction will not produce better outcomes in the Global South or at home. It will simply import the older pattern and call it justice.

The older mid-century Third Worldism at least claimed to seek independence and development on its own terms. The current Western version is different. It is a grievance that never resolves, because resolution would require acknowledging that culture, institutions, and choices matter. That acknowledgment is exactly what the ideology forbids.

Boreing ends on a note that is neither fatalistic nor triumphalist. None of this was inevitable, and none of it is irreversible. We built the fixed price. We built the jury. We built the father who turns in his own son because the truth outranks the blood. Those were choices. Choices can be made differently tomorrow.

The West is strange. That strangeness is the point. Forgetting it is how you lose it.