The pseudo-intellectual’s guide to solving the world’s problems from a DOC campground
Friday, 13 March 2026
Martin van Beynen is a Press journalist and regular opinion contributor.
OPINION: The trouble with being a pseudo-intellectual is that you can never rest.
Even on holiday your mind is busy intellectualising on life's big issues while others engage in less challenging activities such as sunbathing and drinking.
Mrs VB and I are currently sojourning in the beautiful DOC resort of Totaranui which boasts an expansive, leafy campground that can accommodate about 800 people.
Outside the school holidays it is a sparsely populated haven from urban life.
I admit camping is an unusual pastime for that annoying subgroup of humanity who call themselves pseudo-intellectuals. You picture intellectuals enjoying a sabbatical playing chess outside a sunny taverna or engaged in furious debate in a smokey cafe.
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Anyway, here we are in Totaranui where I have been working on some wide-ranging and groundbreaking theories.
I hope you are a better audience than Mrs VB for these pearls of wisdom. I was expounding some of my ideas over pre-dinner drinks but she was more interested in a weka putting its head up our exhaust pipe.
This vacation theorising was prompted by some fairly heavyweight reading I brought along. The book is called Why the West Rules - For Now by Ian Morris, a Brit who is professor of history and classics at Stanford University.
Morris takes a long view of history - 70,000BC to about 2010 - in an effort to identify patterns explaining why different parts of the world achieved significant gains in social development, which he defines as getting things done, at different times.
His conclusion, if I read him right, is that human beings in large groups act similarly, with geography being the reason why the West has generally been ahead of the East in social development, although that looks likely to change after about 2050.
Social change, he says, is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways of “doing things”. Things like growing food, making weapons, collecting tax and organising large groups of people.
His other essential point is called the paradox of development. This is the tendency of development to generate the very forces that undermine it. Social development, he says, is a race between ever 'more threatening disruptions and ever more sophisticated defences'.
Morris applies his theorems to the broad sweep of human history to show how empires developed and fell for essentially the same reasons.
What has this got to do with the Totaranui campground, you might be asking.
The answer is that I have always thought that Totaranui, essentially a contained and compact tent village, could be seen as a microcosm of human society.
If you plonked 1000 people in the Totaranui campground and provided communal facilities, the same tent accommodation and the same income, over time you would see the same tendencies and patterns mentioned by Morris manifest themselves.
On the local front, people would soon separate into classes.
The smarter and more savvy inhabitants would soon occupy the better real estate and manage to do more with the income they received.
A leadership group would emerge, by vote or otherwise, and rules and standards would be set. Most people would be compliant but there would be a group who didn't turn up for their cleaning duties or rubbish sorting. Others would be a nuisance to neighbours and yet others would steal and bully. Factions would form in the campground and they would compete for resources and authority.
A strong and unified campground could emerge and thoughts would turn to the campground further up the coast. Were they friendly and had that raid on the communal firewood really been an aberration carried out by a few hotheads? There was already talk that the Awaroans were getting more than their fair share and seemed to have more luxuries.
If they were unfriendly and a possible threat, some defence capability would be required, and maybe even a pre-emptive attack to bring Awaroa under Totaranui's superior control. Totaranui's success produced a thriving and increasing population, needing more room and resources.
A complicating factor would surface if Totaranuians had discovered a deity who seemed to favour them and also demand respect from other encampments. That could justify destroying a less god-fearing population.
Eventually a war would break out and Awaroa would seek help from its friends in Goat Bay as it sought to repel and defeat the aggressive Totaranuians.
I think you get the picture, which you might think is overly pessimistic. But this seems to be the pattern of history Morris is talking about. Societies with a technological, resource or administrative edge seldom rest on their laurels for long. The drive to grow and dominate, often at horrendous cost, seems to be unstoppable. An efficient state with a strong military has interests which require it to have more influence and control.
Against the broad sweep of history, Trump's conflict with Iran is nothing unusual. China's and Russia's pursuit of a sphere of influence is consistent with an age-old playbook.
It seems that large groups of human beings generate an energy which leads inevitably to conflict. After the terrible wars of last century, we thought we had found a way of minimising or preventing that momentum with a system of international rules and pacts.
For now that system has failed. The great powers, whose leaders act like the emperors of old, cannot muster the self restraint to avoid conflict.
Morris wonders whether we have reached a new hard ceiling where the factors pushing and pulling development threaten to spiral out of control.
The answer to avoiding the seeming inevitably of conflict is simple.
It's not an enlightened global government, as suggested by Albert Einstein after the atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. (He said the “only salvation for civilisation and the human races lies in the creation of world goverment”.)
It's true global problems need global solutions but as my fictional state of Totaranui shows, what is really needed is a change in human nature.