Peasants make for lousy emperors. When you have to guess what power means, you often observe other people in charge, completely miss the nuances as an outsider, and then wildly exaggerate and miss your mark.

People think they are sly and teachable since they think that their shallow theatre proves they can modify their behaviour, when they aren’t doing any such thing.

And if their dysfunctional ways are rewarded as they take their act in public, they will never change.

This is why social media was such a troubling invention: it allowed people to bypass gate-keepers (good), but did it at the expense of cultivating narcissism (bad).

And narcissists thrived on it.

One even became president using it.

But social media is one tiny part of reality, and it’s a distorted one. Building an empire in a funhouse with a distorting mirror is not a good idea.

And with the unleashing of AI V. 1.0, the narcissism scaffolding is starting to crumble.

And the old tricks start to backfire.

Narcissistic gambits usually involve wife-beater logic: threaten, stalk, and blackmail your target. Isolation, degradation, and manipulation until you get your way is a bad way of doing business because not everyone is going to roll over and agree to play your victim.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (whose first name and last name sound like a comic book villain who grifts his targets), is not Justin Trudeau.

Here is a man with no political experience, and became prime minister without getting voted in — and then got a minority government on his first try. He wasn’t even an opposition leader. He is nobody’s fool and anyone who underestimates him will not end well. As a political atheist, I don’t pick artificial sides: I assess personalities and work accordingly.

And Carney very deftly threw a grenade with a single speech.

Carney would not have made this speech on a whim: he covertly signalled that Canada is going to find a better trading partner using their language in his speech, using “hegemony” no less than four times.

This sent Trump into panic mode with more of the same old threats and insults, thinking what worked on Trudeau will work on Carney.

And it will not. Canada exports potash, nickel, electricity, and other vitals to the US. Without potash, you don’t have food. Canada can easily find other markets for it.

But when you are enabled by a vocal minority peasantry who don’t understand power and think their worthless opinions mean something, you become imprisoned by them.

They think power is theft, parasitism, subjugation, and bullying. They think terrorism is a positive leadership quality, and when it doesn’t work, they think the solution is even more of the same. These are people who never held a position of power: they watch bad movies and then think that’s reality. Life has passed them by and they look for a saviour who assures them that they will be vindicated if they find the right emperor who sells them the most colourful lies.

Like promising to annex other countries and fleecing the others with “tariffs”, never mind that tariffs are a euphemism for domestic taxes the true believers have to pay. It sounds like building empire or something; so the cognitive outsourcers gamble their future on backing the emperor because he promises big returns, even when the opposite is happening.

Trump is a lame duck president. He has surrounded himself with nobodies without any experience and gave them paper crowns. They see how those who state the obvious truth get punished, and so, they go along, even if their fortunes crash in the long term. They are stuck and have nowhere else to go: the people they harmed will reject them, and the one who gave them a paper crown will tear them to shreds if they take one step out of line.

But Carney is in an excellent position. Canada is a resource-rich nation — more so than the US. It has global goodwill. While Trump seeks to build an empire, Canada seeks alliances, and it has them. Carney has reached out to the EU, China, and beyond and has always come back with something tangible. Canada doesn’t need a contrived and cringey-sounding “Board of Peace” to function.

Trump knows he’s outclassed and so are his peasant handlers. Trump had no prior political experience and won a presidency on his first try. So did Carney, but Carney doesn’t need to thump his chest to get things done. He doesn’t need a slogan, a baseball cap, threats, drooling incredulous fanboys, wife-beater logic, or an emperor’s crown, and now Carney is on the verge of surpassing lame duck Trump.

In less than a year of becoming prime minister.

And we haven’t even started yet.