The Abstraction of Power

Real power comes from abstraction—the ability to connect everything to everything, compress complexity, and reprogram reality through deep understanding.

Some people grow up reading about revolutions. I grew up in the middle of one.

Not the kind with guns or barricades — that part was already over. What I witnessed was the slow, painful reprogramming of a society’s source code. The silent shift from a system that no longer worked to one we barely understood. And as that happened, I started noticing something strange.

No one seemed to know why the new system worked better. Everyone was copying Western institutions, habits, lifestyles — but it felt like mimicry without understanding. Like kids dressing up in lab coats, expecting to invent something. I kept wondering: What’s the deeper logic here? What are we really importing?

That’s when I realized: what makes Western civilization work isn’t just technology or policy or capitalism. It’s abstraction. It’s the ability to see through the surface of things — to connect economics to psychology to history to code — and to act from understanding, not imitation.

And once you glimpse that pattern — that hidden order beneath all things — everything changes.

Because reality isn’t made of subjects. It’s made of systems. And the most powerful people aren’t those who know the most, but those who see the connections. They’ve learned to think in abstractions — the only language big enough to model reality.

That’s the moment I started chasing what I now think of as the password: the one idea, the elegant abstraction, that connects everything to everything else. And the more abstract it is — the fewer bits it takes to explain — the more powerful it becomes.

The Tyranny of Attention

Here’s the catch: human attention is limited. That’s the original bottleneck. You can only think about one thing at a time. You can’t hold all of economics, psychology, history, biology, and technology in your head at once. Your mind isn’t a supercomputer. It’s more like a flashlight in a dark room.

But abstraction is what lets you point that flashlight at a single idea — and illuminate the entire room.

That’s why I think abstraction is the most underrated human power. It’s not just a cognitive tool. It’s a form of leverage. The right abstraction is like a high-level function call in your brain. Instead of thinking about every step, you call the function — and the logic runs in the background.

This is how you tame the biggest of beasts — the messy, chaotic, overlapping systems that make up our lives and societies. You don’t try to master them directly. You look for the common logic that runs through them. You abstract. You compress. You connect.

And then you start to see the world as it actually is: not as a set of separate domains, but as one interconnected operating system, running on a few recursive principles

This is why I stopped trying to master individual fields and started looking for what they all had in common.

I didn’t care if the insight came from psychology, software, economics, or art. I was after the meta-principles — the rules behind the rules. The patterns that didn’t just solve problems in one domain but opened doors in all of them. Once you start thinking like this, life stops feeling like a checklist of skills to learn and starts feeling like a single puzzle — with fewer pieces than you thought.

That’s when entrepreneurship began to make sense to me.

Entrepreneurship isn’t just about building businesses. It’s about encoding your worldview. A startup is the most direct way to project your internal abstractions into the external world. If you understand systems, you can build better ones. If you understand motivation, you can design products people actually want. If you understand leverage, you can scale without force.

Entrepreneurship became my lab — the place where I could test whether the patterns in my head were real or just philosophical vapor. And over time, it taught me something unexpected: that abstraction, while powerful, isn’t just intellectual. It’s emotional. Because the moment you start seeing the world as systems, you stop feeling trapped by it. You gain control. Not in the authoritarian sense, but in the sense of comprehension. The beast becomes tame because it’s no longer terrifying — it’s predictable.

And that’s where AI comes in.

AI is abstraction made real. It takes the logic you once had to hold in your head and builds it into something external. It turns pattern recognition into software. It’s the ultimate compression tool: feed it enough examples, and it finds the rule. The terrifying thing about AI is also the beautiful thing — it forces us to become more abstract thinkers, because now the low-level stuff is handled. If you want to stay relevant, you have to operate at higher layers of thought. You have to work in ideas, not actions.

Reprogramming Yourself

So what does this mean for someone trying to live a better life — or generally become the evolved glorious radiating “Western man”?

It means this: Don’t imitate the outputs. Understand the inputs.

The real transformation isn’t external. It’s in how you think. A Western mindset, at its best, isn’t about luxury or stability — it’s about mental architecture. It’s about defaulting to systems thinking. It’s about building yourself like a startup: introspecting, optimizing, iterating.

You heal from inherited trauma not by pretending it didn’t happen, but by abstracting it — naming the pattern, then rewriting the code. You stop being a victim of inputs you didn’t choose, and start being the author of systems you do choose.

This is what I wish someone had told me at the start:

Don’t waste your time memorizing the parts of the world.

Learn how the parts connect.

Because if you understand how things connect, you understand how they move.

And if you understand how they move, you can move them.

The password isn’t magic. It’s abstraction.

And abstraction — real, rigorous abstraction — is the closest thing humans have to god mode.

It’s what turns a limited mind into a limitless one.

It’s what lets you tame complexity.

And it’s the one thing worth obsessing over, because when you get it right — everything else gets easier.