… the World
What you’re not meant to know. And how it all comes tumbling down
An essay compiled by LJ Parsons Author of “By Design”
I was standing at Milano Centrale Railway Station in Northern Italy, suitcase in hand, trying to figure out exactly where I was. I glanced hopelessly at the timetable on the digital board and listened to the announcements in the usual chorus of vowels and static that Italians apparently understand from birth. I breathed a conceded sigh when I realised I was on the wrong platform. I could clearly see my train currently departing from platform 5 which I could have reached out and touched if it were not for the 15 minutes of stairs, escalators and no doubt malfunctioning turnstiles en reute.
Aside from all the surrounding organized chaos there lies a mystery. The tracks themselves. They criss-crossed and inter-twined before disappearing into far off dark tunnels, or around wide bends that stretched way beyond my deteriorating vision, to a destination stubbornly out of reach. This, my friend, is the world Immanuel Kant liked to think about, only his mystery was philosophical rather than railway‑related.
Kant, one of the great thinkers of our time, spent his days pondering a question that still makes philosophers twitch. What does reality actually look like? He split reality into two layers, much like the layers of a cake you might sneak a bite of when nobody’s looking. The bottom layer, which he called the “noumenon” or “thing‑in‑itself,” is the hidden, backstage world that exists whether we notice it or not. It’s the rail tracks that no passenger steps on, the raw material of existence that our senses simply can’t touch.
Then comes the top layer, the part we actually experience. Kant named this the “phenomenal world,” and it’s essentially the scenery you see through the train window, the rolling hills, the distant city skyline, or the occasional cow that seems to stare back at you. Our senses act like a pair of well‑meaning but slightly over‑enthusiastic tour guides, filtering the raw world and translating it into something we can understand. Without these mental filters, everything would be a bewildering soup of sensations, and we’d have no way to say whether an event happened before or after another, or where anything was located at all.
Take time and space, for instance. In Kant’s view they’re not mysterious entities lurking somewhere out there; they’re the very frameworks our minds slap onto experience so we can make sense of it. Think of time as the schedule on that digital board and space as the platform map that tells you where the coffee stand is relative to the ticket gate. Neither exists as a physical object floating in the universe, they’re the mental scaffolding that lets us line up events and locate ourselves within the grand theater of life.
So what does all this mean for me, sitting with a coffee in hand and a half‑finished essay looming on the horizon while I wait for the next train? It means that reality isn’t a static picture hanging on a wall, it’s more like a film you’re constantly editing in your head. From where we stand we can never peek directly at the tracks in the tunnel or around the bend, we end up constructing a version of the world that fits our senses, and more importantly, our imagination. In other words, the world you live in is partly built by the way you think about it.
Kant’s grand revelation, then, is both humbling and empowering. There is no single, immutable reality that we can all agree on, because each of us is a little director, cutting and splicing scenes as we go. This isn’t an excuse to drift into wild speculation, far from it. Knowing that our minds are the lenses through which we view everything invites us to question the assumptions that sit comfortably on those lenses. It nudges us to ask, “Why do I see this the way I do?” and, more daringly, “What if I looked at it differently?”
By keeping this in mind, you’ll find yourself less likely to accept the first story you hear about a news event, a historical figure, or even a personal setback. You’ll start to recognise the subtle ways your brain stitches together the raw data it receives, turning a jumble of sensory input into a coherent narrative. And once you realise you’re already doing the work of a philosopher every day by building, revising, and sometimes discarding the stories you tell yourself, you’ll have a powerful new tool for learning, for creativity, and for navigating the wonderfully messy world outside the train windows.
Meanwhile back on the bustling train platform After an hour, I have been kindly advised by an understanding employee of Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane that the arrival of my next train is immanent. With no great enthusiasm I stare at the three separate rail tracks that are laid out in front of me. One track has just been left vacant by a recentl;y departed locomotiva that has disappeared off into the tunnel. That’s the past. The second track is the one at my feet, the train now humming beside me, doors sliding open. That’s the present. And beyond the far‑off signal lights a third line disappears into a veil of mist, its destination unknown. That’s the future. These three rail lines form the backbone of the grand experiment we’re about to embark on together now.
First, let’s admit something honestly. No matter how clever we are, we’ll never reach the exact centre of the universe and point a laser at “objective truth.” Our brains are, after all, delightfully imperfect telescopes, always a tad out of focus.
Still, the act of trying to line up those three rail lines does something wonderful. It sharpens our eyes, steadies our hands, and forces us to ask, “What am I really seeing?” That habit, the habit of relentless questioning, is the real prize. It enables us to sift through the noise, to spot the faint hum of a genuine signal within a chorus of static.
Now, let’s drop the compass needle onto the track we’re on today, right now. The present.
Picture the world stage as a massive, ever‑shifting chessboard, each country a chess piece with its own agenda, each move echoing across continents. Geopolitics, in plain English, is the study of those moves.
Who’s pushing, who’s pulling, and why the board sometimes erupts into outright battle. You might wonder why there’s war in Ukraine, why the Middle East feels like a perpetual fireworks display, or what invisible strings are tugging behind the news headlines. Those are the questions we’ll chase, not merely to satisfy curiosity but to sketch a pattern, a kind of map that reveals the hidden geometry of power. https://hedgehogcottage.com/geopolitics/
To do that, we’ll build an analytical model, a sort of mental GPS for world events. Think of it as a spreadsheet that doesn’t just tally numbers but watches for recurring rhythms and alliances that flare then fizzle, resources that spark conflict. Ideologies that rise and fall like the tides.
Once the model starts resonating, we’ll test it the same way AI researchers use, to educate a system on past data, then let it guess the future, and then see if reality agrees. If the guess is right, the model earns a nod, if it misses, we go back to the drawing board, tweaking assumptions until the picture looks clearer.
If we can say, “Given the current alignment of forces, we’ll likely see X happen in six months,” and then watch the world either confirm or contradict us, we’ve taken a solid step toward understanding. Prediction, after all, is the ultimate litmus test.
But here’s the twist, once our model proves its worth, we can flip it around and point it back at the rail line already travelled, the past. History, as most books present it, is a tidy story handed down by whoever held the microphone at the time. It’s a narrative, not a neutral ledger. Empires have edited, omitted, or embellished events to cement their own legitimacy.
By running our power‑model in reverse, we can peel back those layers of propaganda and glimpse what I like to call the “secret history” of the world, a version of events stripped of the convenient embellishments that served the agendas in play.
Understanding that the official chronicle is only one version of many is liberating. It shifts the central question from “What happened?” to “How does power work?” Power, after all, is the great puppeteer that pulls the strings of perception, decides which stories get told, and which get buried. When you see that mechanism, you gain a kind of mental immunity and you stop taking the surface narrative at face value and start interrogating the motives, incentives, and structures that shape it.
That moment, when the fog lifts enough for you to glimpse the gears turning behind the curtain, is intellectual freedom. It doesn’t mean you’ll never be swayed or that you’ll acquire a crystal‑clear view of every event. It means you’ll have the tools to question, to test, and to re‑assemble the puzzle on your own terms. You’ll be able to take any of those tracks, past–present-future, with a sharper awareness that the map is provisional, but the skill of reading it is yours.
So, buckle up. We’ll start by charting today’s geopolitical landscape, craft a model that can forecast tomorrow, and then turn that model back to rewrite yesterday. Along the way, we’ll discover not just how the world works, but how the stories we tell about it shape the very reality we live in. And in that discovery, you’ll find the freedom to think for yourself and to see the world as it truly appears to you. Then to live by a truth you helped uncover.
Let me give you the first example of how power truly works.
Money. Surprise!
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine my family opens a bank. My bank, and you’re all invited to deposit your money into it. So you all group together and deposit a tidy sum of €1,000,000.
Why do you do this? Because I promise you 2% interest. That seems like a fair deal. But now I owe you that interest, which means I need to generate profit myself.
Fortunately, I have a friend who wants to open a restaurant and he needs €1,000,000 and promises to pay me back in one year with 10% interest. Perfect, I lend him the money. I’ll make an 8% profit, enough to pay your 2% interest, cover my expenses, and keep a healthy margin for myself.
Now stop and think:
I started with €1,000,000 in deposits, and I’ve loaned out €1,000,000. So, how much money is left in the bank? Logically, the answer should be zero. That’s what standard economics teaches, money in equals money out.
But that’s not how the modern banking system works. Banks don’t operate on simple one-to-one accounting. They use what’s called the fractional reserve.
Under this system, banks are required to keep only a fraction of deposits on hand, typically around 10%, and they can lend out the rest. So, in our example, I must hold back €100,000, and I’m legally allowed to lend out €900,000.
Now here’s the strange part. When I issue that loan, the €900,000 doesn’t come from the deposits you gave me. It is created, typed into existence on a computer as a line of credit. So at this moment, there appears to be €1,900,000 in the economy. Tour €1,000,000 deposit (which still exists on paper) and the €900,000 I just lent out.
That extra €900,000 didn’t exist before. It was created from nothing or “Debt”.
This may sound like a trick, but it’s not, it’s how all modern banking systems function, and its legal.
You can see this process clearly if you look at China’s rise over the past two decades. The Bank of China, the Industrial and Commercial Bank, and the Agricultural Bank of China have become some of the largest financial institutions in the world. Not because ordinary people suddenly became rich and flooded the banks with savings, but because the Chinese government supported a massive expansion of credit. The banks issued vast amounts of loans to corporations, to the government, to ordinary people, to fund infrastructure, build skyscrapers, highways, entire cities.
In other words, they created money out of nothing to build the modern Chinese economy. And this isn’t unique to China, all central banks in the world operate on this principle.
Banks, through the mechanism of credit, have the power to turn nothing, (a promise, a contract, a belief) into something. That’s what money really is, an idea backed by power.
So, how did this whole system come into being? The answer is actually quite simple.
In the beginning, it was merchants who first engaged in finance. Merchants needed money to facilitate trade, to buy goods, ship them, and sell them elsewhere. Some of these merchants became extremely wealthy, and with their accumulated capital, they began to establish their own banks to support trade for themselves and for others.
In those days, banks dealt primarily in gold, because gold was the dominant form of money. People would deposit their gold for safekeeping, and in return the bank would issue a receipt, a written “promise to pay the bearer.” a “Thank you for depositing your gold. You may withdraw it at any time.”
That receipt became a kind of contract, and soon it was used as a convenient substitute for the gold itself.
For example, imagine I’m a merchant in Italy who needs to buy cotton in England. Instead of carrying heavy, risky shipments of gold across the sea, I could simply take my receipt and show it to the English trader. He would accept it as payment, knowing he could later redeem it for gold from the bank.
In this way, receipts began circulating as money, facilitating trade across long distances.
Now, let’s return to the position of the bank. I have a vault full of gold, let’s say €1 million worth. Other merchants come to me and say, “I need gold for a transaction. Can you lend me some?”
I could give them the physical gold, but that would be risky and inconvenient. So instead, I give them another receipt, another contract that says I owe them gold.
Notice what’s just happened: I’ve now issued more paper promises than I have gold in the vault. There is still only €1 million in gold, but there are now €2 million worth of receipts circulating. In other words, I have just created money out of nothing.
This is how “Comex” works.
That’s the origin of the modern banking system, and of credit itself.
Now, there’s a problem with this setup, it depends entirely on belief.
The system works only because people trust the bank to honour those receipts. If everyone came to withdraw their gold at once, the illusion would collapse. But as long as people believe, the system stands, and money continues to multiply.
For most of human history, though, ordinary people didn’t use money at all. They lived in small communities or villages where life revolved around barter and exchange. If you wanted something, you traded for it, a goat or two for a cow, a sack of grain for tools.
Money was unnecessary for daily life. It appeared only in special circumstances, and most often as a symbolic tool rather than a practical one. Mostly relating to family feuds.
For example, if one person killed another, vengeance between families could spiral endlessly. So instead of continuing the blood feud, the killer might pay the victim’s family a sum of money, a symbolic debt. This money didn’t erase the wrongdoing, it represented a debt that could never truly be repaid.
That’s what money originally meant. a symbol of obligation, not wealth, not productivity, but a way of balancing moral and social relationships.
Only with the rise of trade did money become a practical tool, a medium of trust among merchants who already knew each other and needed a simpler way to do business.
At its core, money has always been about belief and trust, an idea we collectively agree to honour. And that, ultimately, is how power works.
Let’s return to our question.
This system looks brilliant, I can create money out of nothing. But there’s a serious flaw.
I have €1 million in gold in my vault, but I’ve issued €2 million worth of receipts promising to redeem that gold. What happens if everyone shows up at once to collect their gold? I go bankrupt.
The contract says that anyone can withdraw their gold at any time. But if I’ve loaned out far more than I actually possess, say €100 million in promises backed by only €1 million of gold, then I’m finished. That’s what we call a bank run. On average there are currently over 100 bid contracts per ounce of gold held by Comex. Gold that doesn’t exist.
A bank run occurs when confidence collapses and everyone rushes to convert paper “promises” back into real assets. This is the Achilles’ heel of the entire system.
But there was another problem too, Who was borrowing all this money?
In those early centuries, there were few “entrepreneurs” in the modern sense. The main borrowers were kings and nobles, and they needed money for one reason and one reason only …war.
Kings borrowed to hire soldiers and build fleets. They would fund campaigns, usually against other kings, sometimes even their own brothers, to control territory. War, of course, is expensive and unpredictable. A king might die in battle or, more commonly, simply decide not to repay his debts.
That made lending extremely risky.
To reduce this risk, powerful banking families began to form alliances, networks of cooperation and protection. These were the first cartels, groups of banks that agreed to support one another if one ran short of gold or if a debtor defaulted.
They often sealed these alliances through intermarriage, uniting families across Europe into webs of loyalty and finance. So, if I had €100 million in receipts outstanding but only €1 million in gold, I could simply call upon my partners, a hundred other banks in the cartel, to help cover the shortage.
And if a king refused to pay his debts?
The network could respond collectively, perhaps by financing his enemies, funding rebellions, or even waging economic war until repayment was secured.
Over time, this network of cooperation evolved into what we now call central banking, a system designed to stabilise credit between nations and powerful financial institutions.
Today, at the core of this global network sits the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland, the central bank of central banks, which coordinates and clears transactions between all major financial powers.
What’s most important to understand is that this system is not based on gold or paper, it’s based on power.
Power is what transforms nothing (a promise, a piece of paper, a line of code) into something of value.
And that’s what money truly is, an idea backed by power.
So, we live in a world where banks can print money. Just… print it. Out of thin air. Tap a few keys, and voilà, billions appear. Now, here’s a question. If money can be created with all the effort of ordering a pizza online, then why, exactly, do we have poverty?
You’d think the solution would be simple, wouldn’t you? Just give some of that freshly printed money to people who don’t have any, and poof! No more poverty. Problem solved. Nobel Prize, please.
Except, of course, it doesn’t work like that. We’re told the reason people starve while the world overflows with food is because of scarcity. That’s the big economic word, scarcity. There’s never enough of something: not enough food, not enough oil, not enough money, not enough common sense.
But hold on. If banks can create money from absolutely nothing, then money isn’t scarce at all. It’s infinite. It’s not some rare mineral buried deep in the mountains, it’s a number on a screen. And those numbers can be conjured up any time we like.
So why do we still have poor people? Why does anyone sleep on the streets when the world’s money supply could, theoretically, solve that in an afternoon?
Here’s the trick, we’ve all been trained, lovingly, persistently, from birth, to believe that money is scarce. That there’s only so much to go around. It’s one of the great pieces of social conditioning. A magic trick so convincing that even when you know how it’s done, you still fall for it.
Money isn’t scarce. It’s infinite. But belief, belief in its scarcity is what keeps the whole game going.
So, back to the question. Why is there poverty? Why do people starve? Why is there inequality? If money is infinite, what’s the real reason?
Now, here’s the thing about money. The people who have it (and the delightful ability to conjure more of it whenever they wish) don’t actually want everyone else to have it too. Why? Because then no one would bother working.
See, the point of printing money isn’t to give you money. The point is to create the illusion that money is valuable so you’ll spend your life chasing it. Think of it as a global motivational scheme except instead of positive affirmations, it runs on mild despair.
If there weren’t poor people, you wouldn’t be all that interested in becoming rich. You’d probably spend your time painting, or learning to play the ukulele, or taking unnecessarily long naps. But since you see people struggling, you think, “Well, I’d better make sure that’s not me.” And off you go, working yourself into an early back problem.
Even your parents got the memo. “Work hard in school or you’ll end up poor!” they say. Never, “Work hard in school so you can find fulfillment and inner peace.” No, it’s always, “So you don’t end up like them.” If there were no poor people, that line wouldn’t work, and frankly, half the parenting playbook would vanish overnight.
So that’s why we have poverty, it’s not a natural consequence of laziness or bad luck. It’s a carefully maintained illusion designed to make money seem important. Poverty isn’t something you do to yourself, it’s something done to you, to keep the game running.
Now, let’s talk about crises, the kind economists whisper about in the same tone priests use for exorcisms. You know, stock market crashes, recessions, “economic downturns.” You’re not taught this in class, which is odd, because it’s rather important, crises exist to destroy money.
Why destroy money? Because if too much of it sloshes around, people start relaxing. And relaxed people are terrible workers. So, periodically, we have to blow up a few banks, tank the housing market, or unleash some other “adjustment,” just to remind everyone that money is scarce.
And wars? Same thing. You were told they’re about scarce resources, oil, land, gold, diamonds. But remember, scarcity is largely fiction. The real purpose of war is to destroy wealth and make you believe that money, once again, has value.
If you’ve ever played World of Warcraft, you’ve already lived this system. You spend your days fighting imaginary monsters on your play station for imaginary gold so you can buy imaginary armour. If gold just rained down from the sky, you’d stop playing. You’d get bored. Maybe (heaven forbid) even go outside. So the game has to make you work for it. Sound familiar?
That’s our world. An elaborate illusion designed by central banks to keep everyone working as hard as possible. Because the real value isn’t in the money. It’s in your labour.
And it’s not just money. The same trick works beautifully with everything else, agriculture, energy, diamonds, even carrots. To make something valuable, you must first make it scarce.
Take diamonds, for example. When the Argyle Diamond Mine in Western Australia shut down in 2020, its haul, roughly 865 million carats, didn’t all flood the market. Oh no. Most of it was quietly locked away in vaults across Perth, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and New York. Why? Because if all those diamonds hit the shelves, their value would diminish considerably. Barbie dolls would come wearing them as accessories.
And food? The ultimate joke. Is food really a finite resource? Go visit a rubbish tip sometime. You’ll find mountains of perfectly edible food dumped daily. We throw away so much that, if you added it all up, we could feed every hungry person on Earth several times over.
The problem isn’t lack of supply, it’s the appearance of lack. “Best before” and “sell by” dates weren’t invented out of concern for your digestive safety. They’re there to control turnover, manage profit, and make sure that abundance never quite looks like abundance. Why is the British Government or the Netherlands Government putting the kybosh on farming?
Food isn’t infinite, but it’s abundant. There’s more than enough for everyone when we’re growing it. What we have instead is an artificial crisis, dressed up as economic law, and we’ve all agreed to pretend it’s real.
And then, of course, there’s oil, the black goop we’re apparently willing to destroy planets, policies, and polite conversation over. Why do we have oil reserves? You know, those great underground piggy banks of energy that nations guard like dragons sitting on treasure? The official story is that reserves are about “security” keeping a little something tucked away for a rainy day. Which is odd, because last time I checked, the oil industry doesn’t seem to be running short.
No, like diamonds, money, and just about everything else, oil is part of the great theatre of scarcity. We live in a world of abundance, but it’s presented to us as a world of shortage, a world where there’s always “just enough to worry.” And that worry keeps the engines turning.
So, we’ve talked about money. Let’s move to something equally slippery, happiness.
What makes us happy?
Easy answer, money, of course. Although, to be fair, that only works until you actually get some. Once you’ve paid off the bills, bought a shiny car, and discovered that it doesn’t fill the yawning existential void, you start reaching for the next level, power, freedom, relationships, video games, beach holidays, that third streaming service you never watch.
All fine things, but notice something: every item on that list is about you. Your happiness. Your comfort. Your entertainment. Your perfectly filtered selfie at the airport.
And that’s new. Genuinely new. If you went back in time, not far, just ten thousand years or so, which in human terms is yesterday, and asked people what made them happy, they wouldn’t even understand the question. Happiness wasn’t something you pursued alone. It was something your community shared. If your neighbours were miserable, you didn’t get to be happy. You were all in it together, for better or worse.
For most of history, happiness meant generosity, helping others, feeding others, sharing what you had. Take this example, let’s say I wandered off into the hills one day and, against all odds, stumble upon a pile of gold. What do I do? Dig a hole and bury it? Of course not. That’s what we do now, we call it “saving.”
Back then, I’d throw the biggest feast the village had ever seen. Everyone would eat, drink, and sing until dawn. Why? Because wealth meant nothing unless it was shared. Your reputation, your standing in the tribe, came from your generosity, not your bank balance.
Fast forward a few centuries, and now if you come into money, the last thing you do is tell anyone. You hire an accountant, open an offshore account, and buy a house with gates tall enough to keep joy itself at bay.
But for most of human history, happiness was communal. Reputation was happiness. Because after all, once you’d eaten enough and had a roof over your head, what else was there but belonging?
The concept of the “individual”, the idea that I exist independently of my family, my community, and the world around me, is a fairly recent invention. Once upon a time, being “independent” was not a virtue, it was a death sentence.
In fact, the worst punishment you could receive wasn’t death at all. It was exile. Banishment. Being cut off from your people. Death was quick, exile was slow and lonely. It meant you no longer mattered to anyone.
And that’s the irony of modern life. We’ve traded shared happiness for personal success, and then wondered why, despite all the stuff, all the screens, and all the streaming platforms, we still feel like something’s missing and live amongst a society revelling in depression.
Now, let’s talk about monotheism. You know, one true God, one supreme being, one cosmic CEO in charge of everything. It may sound simple, but this idea marked a colossal intellectual shift in human history. Once upon a time, people believed in a boardroom full of gods, dozens of divine middle managers, each responsible for something, one for rain, one for fertility, one for making sure your crops didn’t die and your cows didn’t wander off. Then along came monotheism, which said, “No, no, no. One god. One boss. Streamline the operation.”
With this single divine figure came three other big ideas that would change everything. Money, the individual, and the nation-state.
Now, these ideas had existed before, of course. But monotheism gave them promotion and purpose. They stopped being background features of human life and became the cornerstones of modernity, the framework for the world we live in today. Which, if we’re being honest, has created a few problems along the way.
Because if you look around, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the world might be in decline.
You don’t have to be a historian or a pessimist to notice the signs. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, tensions bubbling in Southeast Asia, talk of troop deployments to Mexico and Venezuela, it’s like the world’s taken up global conflict as a hobby.
Then there’s climate change, which we seem to be handling with all the urgency of someone trying to fix a leaking roof using blue-tak. The air, water, and soil are becoming increasingly toxic, and we’re all pretending it’s fine as long as we can still order same-day delivery.
Unemployment is up. Enthusiasm for work is down. In China, they’ve even coined a term for it, bailan “let it rot.” In the West, we call it “quiet quitting,” which is the polite way of saying “doing as little as humanly possible while still collecting a paycheck.” It’s less a labour movement and more a collective shrug.
Then there’s the birth rate, or rather, the lack of one. Across much of the world, young people aren’t getting married or having kids. Apparently, they’ve done the math and decided, quite sensibly, that the planet doesn’t need more humans right now. Only a few places, like Israel and Georgia, are still enthusiastically reproducing, but they’re the exceptions, not the rule.
Meanwhile, the cost of living climbs like a balloon you can’t grab hold of. Wages stagnate, prices rise, and “affordable housing” has become something you now find in history books. Governments are drowning in debt, and families aren’t doing much better. Fiscal crisis is the polite economist’s term for “we’ve spent all the money and have no idea how to get more.”
And let’s not forget trust, that lovely, fragile thing that once held societies together. It’s evaporating. We walk past people in distress, we avoid eye contact on the bus, and we treat kindness as though it’s suspicious behaviour.
Health? Also in decline. We live longer, but we feel worse. Diabetes, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, the whole catalogue of the modern feeling of general discomfort. The irony is that we’ve invented machines to make life easier, and yet somehow, we’re more exhausted than ever.
Optimism is down, stress is up, and everyone’s a bit more irritable than they were five years ago. The signs of social decline are piling up like unopened bills.
Now, if you flip that picture, if you look at a society on the rise, it’s the exact opposite. People trust each other. They save money instead of borrowing it. They’re healthier, hopeful, and busily producing the next generation. They build, rather than complain.
But in much of the modern world, we’re seeing the opposite. Immigration becomes a flashpoint. Cohesion weakens. Houses become too expensive to buy. Governments can’t afford pensions or public services. It’s as if the entire global system is quietly wobbling, still standing, but with that unsettling creak that makes you wonder how long before the floorboards give way.
And yet, we keep telling ourselves it’s fine. Just a temporary phase. Everything’s under control. The same way a passenger on the Titanic might have said, “It’s just a bit of ice. No big deal.”
So, the big question. Why is the world in decline?
It’s not exactly a new topic, philosophers, economists, and the occasional pub landlord have been tackling it for centuries, but today I want to give you three theories that I think are particularly interesting. Let’s start with the first one. Financialisation.
This idea comes from the French economist Thomas Piketty, who wrote a rather cheerful little book called Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It’s about 700 pages long, so if you ever have insomnia, it’s a solid option. But the main point is fascinating. Capitalism, he says, evolves through stages, like Pokémon, only less fun and more paperwork.
In the first stage, you have consumer capitalism. This is the good old-fashioned kind, where people actually make things, cars, clothes, toasters, slightly disappointing smartphones. It’s an era of rapid wealth creation because the focus is on producing real goods that people want to buy.
Then comes financial capitalism, when society decides that building factories and employing people is far too much effort. Instead, we invest. We pour money into the stock market, into derivatives, into whatever new financial instrument someone’s just made up over lunch. The goal isn’t to create wealth anymore, it’s to create money.
And yes, there’s a difference.
Wealth is the factory, the machines, the jobs, the tangible stuff that improves life. Money, on the other hand, is the number that appears on your phone screen when you open your banking app. And in this brave new world, the number is all that matters.
Eventually, that leads us to monopoly capitalism, the final Pokémon evolution, the one where only a few companies control everything. Which, as you might have noticed, is precisely where we are today. Why have a hundred competitors when you can have four? It’s far more profitable that way.
Now, here’s why this matters. When capitalism shifts from creating wealth to creating money, people stop focusing on work and start focusing on speculation. Suppose I’m an entrepreneur, and I want to get rich. In the old days, I’d build a factory. That factory would employ workers, buy raw materials, pay taxes, and make products people actually use.
But once I’ve made a tidy profit, the temptation kicks in. Why bother with factories, unions, or health and safety inspections when I can just dump the whole lot into the stock market and watch it grow faster than mould on bread?
And that’s exactly what happens. Everyone wants to invest. Everyone wants their money to multiply on its own. Which sounds great until you realise that, at some point, no one’s actually making anything anymore.
Piketty did the maths, pages and pages of it, because he’s French and takes this sort of thing very seriously, and what he found was striking. In the late stage of capitalism, the real economy (the part that makes things) grows by about 2% a year. The financial economy, however, grows at 5%.
Now, let’s put that into plain English. Say you’ve got £1 million lying around, as one does. You can either open a restaurant, employ people, create something of actual value, and maybe make £20,000 a year. Or, you can toss it into the stock market, do absolutely nothing, and make £50,000.
So what do you do? You invest. Everybody invests. And then, surprise! the stock market booms while the real economy just sits there twiddling its thumbs. The result? More unemployment, more debt, less productivity, and a society that looks rich on paper but increasingly hollow underneath.
According to Piketty, this isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. It’s what capitalism naturally evolves into, a self-feeding system where money begets money while the actual creation of wealth quietly starves in the corner.
In other words, we are living in late-stage capitalism, a kind of economic endgame where the players are still moving their pieces but the outcome is already decided.
The second theory is something called “Elite Overproduction.”
It sounds like the title of a bad Netflix documentary, but it’s actually a serious idea proposed by historian Peter Turchin, who spent decades studying why societies rise, wobble, and then faceplant spectacularly into history.
He looked at the Romans, the Egyptians, the French Revolution, basically, all the greatest hits of civilisation’s nervous breakdowns, and he came to a fascinating conclusion. Societies collapse not because they run out of resources, but because they produce too many elites.
In other words, you end up with far more powerful, ambitious people than there are positions of power for them to occupy. Imagine a game of musical chairs, except the chairs are government ministries, board seats, and university tenure positions, and half the players have inherited a small army of lawyers.
Now, to really understand this, we need to take a detour into the world of rodents.
Back in the 1960s, an American scientist named James B. Calhoun decided to run a bizarre but brilliant experiment known as “Rat Utopia.” His question was simple. What happens to a population when it has everything it could ever want?
After World War II, the world was booming. There was peace, prosperity, and a growing sense that humanity had cracked the code. So Calhoun decided to test this idea, on rats, naturally, because that’s how science works.
He built a perfectly controlled environment, a sealed room with endless food, clean water, cosy nesting spaces, and absolutely no predators. A sort of rodent Claridges-Savoy. He started with a small colony, about ten rats, and before long they multiplied into hundreds.
At first, everything was idyllic. The rats were happy, social, and, as rats tend to be, enthusiastically reproductive. But then, things started to go sideways.
No matter how Calhoun set up the experiment, more space, less space, better food, fancier rat houses, the ending was always the same: they ended up killing each other.
After twenty years of experiments, the result never changed. Given enough time and abundance, the rats always descended into chaos. They fought, they formed gangs, they neglected their young, and eventually the colony collapsed.
Now, Calhoun couldn’t quite explain why this happened, but he had a theory. The rats weren’t fighting over food, they were fighting over status.
See, in nature, rats compete for mates and territory. The dominant male wins the lady rat of his dreams (a sentence I never thought I’d say aloud), and the losers scurry off to find new ground and start again. Everyone gets a turn somewhere.
But in Calhoun’s sealed utopia, there was nowhere else to go. The losers couldn’t leave, so they stayed, and kept fighting. Status became a zero-sum game. If I’m the top rat, you’re not. End of story. And when there’s no escape valve, that pressure builds until everything collapses.
This, Turchin argues, is precisely what happens to human societies. As civilisations prosper, they start producing more and more elites, educated, ambitious people who all believe they’re destined for greatness. Politicians, executives, influencers, the children of privilege, all jostling for a finite number of powerful positions.
At first, it’s manageable. But eventually, you have too many elites and not enough “top spots.” Or, to put it in modern terms, too many graduates and not enough good jobs. Everyone wants to lead, but nobody wants to dig the metaphorical ditches.
And when that happens, the competition turns nasty. Factions form, conflict spreads, and society begins to fracture under the weight of its own ambitions.
Turchin’s conclusion is sobering. Elite overproduction inevitably ends in either revolution or war. It’s not a matter of “if,” but “when.”
In other words, civilisation doesn’t collapse because the poor rise up, it collapses because the powerful start eating each other.
The third theory, and it’s a rather morbid one, comes from the German philosopher Oswald Spengler, who proposed that civilizations have life cycles, much like people do.
A culture, he argued, is essentially a living organism. It’s born, it grows up, it matures, and inevitably, it dies. No amount of optimism, technology, or TED Talks can change that.
Spengler’s view is comfortingly bleak. You see, he says every civilization follows a fairly predictable trajectory. It starts small, a humble village, full of dirt, crops, and a reassuring number of chickens. Then, as things get organized, the village becomes a town. The town becomes a city. The city swells into a megacity, full of light, noise, and overpriced coffee. And at that point, congratulations, your civilization has officially peaked. From there, it’s all downhill.
Now, in the early village stage, life is beautifully simple. People know one another. They work hard, share resources, and take genuine pride in things like ploughing fields and having an alarmingly large number of children. In traditional villages, families often had eight or ten kids, not because of sentimentality, but because, as every farmer knows, children are excellent free labour.
But as civilization grows, something interesting happens. Abstraction sets in. That’s Spengler’s word, not mine, though it’s a good one. Abstraction means becoming detached from the realities of life. In the village, you know exactly where your food comes from, you planted the seeds yourself. In the city, you have no idea. Food just appears, often in cardboard. You don’t milk the cow, you scan it at Tesco.
As abstraction grows, the sense of community weakens. Villagers help one another because they must, survival depends on it. But city dwellers? They outsource compassion. In a village, if you fall ill, everyone rallies round to care for you. In a megacity, if you fall ill, you call an ambulance and pay someone to care for you. Your neighbours don’t have to know your name. In fact, they probably don’t.
And this, Spengler says, is where things begin to rot from the inside. The further a society moves from its roots, the more individualistic it becomes. Tradition gives way to transaction. Instead of shared emotion or duty, what binds people together now is money, the grandest abstraction of all.
Money is marvellously convenient because it means you never have to actually trust anyone. You can walk through an entire life in London, Milan, or New York, without needing to rely on your neighbours for anything except Wi-Fi. It’s efficient, yes, but also hollow. People stop having children, they’re too busy, too self-involved, or too comfortable outsourcing meaning to consumer goods.
And that, Spengler tells us, is the death of civilization.
When people stop building for the future, both literally and biologically, the culture begins its final descent.
Look around. What are London, Paris, New York, Beijing, and Milan if not the megacities of our age? Glittering, self-absorbed, hyper-individualised, running 24 hours a day but somehow always exhausted. According to Spengler, this is not decline that can be reversed, it’s decline that is earned. The natural consequence of success.
And even if we faced an external threat, say, an alien invasion or China deciding it fancies a weekend in England, Spengler would argue it wouldn’t matter. By the time a civilization reaches the megacity stage, it’s already too atomised to unite against anything. We like to imagine that, in a crisis, the nation would rally together flags waving, Churchillian speeches, the lot. But Spengler would smirk and say, “Would they, though?”
In truth, when people stop trusting each other, they stop defending each other. Instead of banding together, they start picking sides. Some would resist, others would collaborate, not out of treason, but out of habit. After all, in a world built on self-interest, loyalty is just another subscription service.
So there you have it, three theories of decline.
One economic, one sociological, and one existentially depressing.
The problem with theories, and it’s a fairly major one, is that they’re often wrong. Not entirely wrong, just mostly. They are simplifications of a world that refuses to stay simple. But that doesn’t make them useless. A theory is like a map, not to scale, wildly inaccurate, but still helpful when you’re lost.
So, with full awareness of its shortcomings, let’s build a working framework, a broad, holistic model for why societies rise, thrive, and then fall apart spectacularly.
At the core of every society sits a small group of extraordinarily powerful families. These are the owners of the system, the founders and quiet shareholders of civilization. There are never many of them. In Rome, perhaps two hundred families controlled an empire that stretched from Scotland to Egypt. The scale doesn’t matter. The pattern does.
Now, these families rule not through armies or charisma but through three ancient cores of power.
- Finance, the control of money and credit. Religion, the control of belief. Intelligence, the control of information.
Together, these cores form the centre of control. From this centre flow all the other arms of power, like governments, schools, the military, the media, even organised crime. The corporations orbit around this core, like moons around a gravitational centre, shaping public life but never escaping the influence of the families that ultimately fund and direct them.
And then, beyond all of this, beyond the marble offices and think-tanks and trust funds, are the people. The great mass. The workers, the taxpayers, the ones who actually generate the energy that keeps the system alive.
A simple metaphor helps here. Imagine society as a business. The families are the owners. The middle class or, as we might call them today, the Professional Managerial Class, are the managers, and the people are the workers.
This is, of course, a crude simplification, but a useful one. The workers do the heavy lifting. The managers organise the workers (and occasionally themselves). And the owners sit at the top, collecting dividends and issuing memos that start with “We’re all in this together.”
When a society is rising, these three groups are in harmony. The owners are content to let the managers handle day-to-day governance. The managers, in turn, try to keep the workers motivated by offering just enough wages, rights, and democratic illusions to maintain the peace. Everyone feels reasonably optimistic. People get married, have children, and the economy hums.
But over time, something predictable happens. Elite overproduction. The top families produce too many heirs and not enough positions of power. The grandchildren of the powerful still expect influence, but the boardroom only has so many chairs. The competition turns inward, power begins to devour itself.
Meanwhile, the middle class. the managers, find themselves caught in the crossfire. They don’t want to lose their privileges, so they turn their attention downward. Instead of restraining the elites, they start squeezing the workers. They invent new fees, taxes, compliance systems, and managerial nonsense, what economists politely call rent-seeking behaviour.
“Rent-seeking” simply means getting paid not for creating value, but for owning access. The landlord collects rent because you need a roof. The lawyer collects fees because you can’t enter the court without one. The bureaucrat collects a salary because someone has to process the forms he helped invent.
It’s the same logic throughout. Control a chokepoint, and you can extract wealth indefinitely.
At this stage, the society enters financialisation, as Piketty described. Instead of building factories, people build portfolios. Money is no longer a medium of exchange. it becomes the product itself. Real wealth (production, innovation, physical work) grows by 2%, but financial wealth (stocks, speculation, leverage) grows by 5%. And when it’s easier to make money from money than from doing anything useful, the entire economy quietly stops being productive.
The managers, addicted to rent. The elites, addicted to power. And the people, exhausted.
And then in the words of Peter Turchin, the rats start fighting.
The elite factions turn on each other. Each side recruits allies from the middle class, who in turn mobilize the masses. Factions harden, narratives calcify, and soon every issue, from trade policy to toilet paper, becomes a battlefield. Revolution or civil war follows. Not because the people rise up against oppression, but because the elites implode under their own weight.
This, Spengler would say, is the civilizational life cycle in full bloom. The village becomes a town, the town becomes a city, the city becomes a megacity and then it all begins to rot from within. People stop planting seeds and start buying salad kits. Compassion gives way to convenience. Money replaces meaning. Neighbours become strangers who share a Wi-Fi connection.
By this stage, the society is too fragmented to respond to any external threat. If aliens invaded, half the population would livestream it, the other half would blame it on misinformation, and a few entrepreneurial types would start selling “official alien repellant” on TikTok. The real enemy isn’t external. It’s entropy.
So what happens next?
The same thing that’s always happened. The system collapses. Power fragments. The elites flee or fall. The people suffer. And eventually, out of the ruins, a new village appears.
The names change, the technologies change, but the rhythm, the great vibrational pattern of civilization, stays the same. Rise, flourish, fracture, fall.
The cycle is not a tragedy. It’s a law of nature.
So, that’s the model we’re using to explain how societies rise and fall. To recap quickly, at the top you’ve got the elite families, in the middle the managers (the middle class), and at the base the people, who actually do the work. Early on, the elites are content to let the managers motivate and reward the workers through democracy, openness, merit, and a bit of genuine innovation. Everyone’s got skin in the game, and the system hums.
But time passes. The elites have more children, the children expect privilege, and many of them learn how to extract income without creating value by rent-seeking, using power of family connections, the usual talent for turning influence into income. The corporation (that is, the state or the economy) starts to creak and run into debt. Managers feel their cushy lives at risk, so instead of reining in elite excess, they squeeze the workers harder. That squeezing, higher rents, more paperwork, higher taxes, fewer real opportunities, breeds resentment. Factions form. The elites split into competing camps. The middle class picks sides. The people are pulled in. Eventually, the peaceful hum turns into factional warfare, revolution, or full-blown civil conflict. That, in short, is collapse.
A couple of clarifications worth making. First, when I say the elites’ chief concern is passing privilege to the next generation, I mean it literally. Power is hereditary by design, marry into other powerful families, multiply the alliances, keep the wealth in the circle. It’s biological, social, and political insurance all rolled into one, and it explains the frantic matchmaking at every level of high society.
Second, when I talk about decline, I don’t necessarily mean things get dramatically worse overnight. Decline can simply mean things stop getting better. Rise is improvement. Decline is stagnation or a slow slide. Collapse is the system’s structural failure.
Now, the three phases show up in predictable ways:
On the rise, societies are open. Social mobility is real and talent can move up, criticism is encouraged, debate is seen as a tool for improvement, and innovation accelerates. Openness doesn’t care whether you’re politically left or right; it’s a developmental state. Think of the post-war boom, opportunities abounded, critics were heard, and the social compact felt reasonable to most.
In decline, openness ossifies into bureaucracy. Managers feel endangered and so they prove their value with paperwork, rules, and systems that mainly exist to justify their positions. Bureaucracy is the managerial attempt to make the world legible and controllable, often at the expense of effectiveness.
In collapse, bureaucracy ceases to suffice and becomes authoritarianism. Consent turns into coercion. Where once legitimacy derived from the agreement of citizens, it is replaced by force, threats, and blunt command.
There’s also a simple way to think about how the social contract degrades. Consent → deception → coercion.
Imagine a petty lunchtime decision. In rise, we discuss options, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC … vote, and go with the majority. Consensus, polite argument, everyone feels heard.
In decline, the boss persuades you we must go to McDonald’s because “Tom Cruise will be there”, a lie spun to get his way. That’s deception.
In collapse, the boss physically drags you to the car and says, “Get in or else.” That’s coercion. Same decision, progressively worse governance.
The same pattern shows at scale. On the rise, people share empathy and a sense of collective purpose. In decline, the priority shifts to stability, keep the status quo, maintain order, avoid risk. In collapse, it’s survival, every man for themselves, and moral calculus narrows to “me first.”
So, put simply, Rise = openness, consent, cooperation, shared improvement.
Decline = bureaucracy, deception, stagnation.
Collapse = authoritarianism, coercion, factional survival.
That’s the engine of the model. It explains why societies that once seemed unstoppable can end up locked in internecine conflict, why elites sometimes cannibalise their own systems, and why ordinary people are often left paying the bill.
If you want the bleak punchline, this is not just a political problem or an economic one, it’s structural. It’s a mode of organisation that, left unchecked, tends to reproduce the same dysfunctions. Which means our practical question becomes less “Who’s right?” and more “What systems can we design to prevent the spiral from openness → bureaucracy → coercion?”
But that’s for another time. For now, remember the three actors (families, managers, people), the three cores (finance, religion, intelligence), and the three phases (rise, decline, collapse). They’re a tidy set of lenses that, imperfect as they are, let you read history without tripping over every other paradox.
So this is our map, a framework showing what happens as societies rise, decline, and finally collapse.
Now, what’s really interesting about this model isn’t just what happens, but when it happens, the timing.
If you chart it, the pattern looks something like this, a steep rise, then a long, drawn-out decline, and finally, an abrupt collapse, straight off a cliff.
People often imagine decline as a gentle slide: “Sure, things are getting worse, but we’ll adapt, we’ll manage.”
But that’s not how it works. The collapse, when it comes, happens fast. Why? Because once the system becomes rigid and authoritarian, it loses its ability to absorb external shocks.
Let me explain that.
When a society is in the rise phase, open, democratic, innovative, it’s resilient. A single crisis, even a big one, doesn’t destroy it. You can hit it with a pandemic, it adapts. A climate crisis, it innovates. A drought, it organizes. A war, it unites. Each shock is survivable on its own.
But what the system cannot survive is the perfect storm, multiple crises hitting all at once.
When everything happens together, economic strain, political unrest, environmental disaster, conflict, the structure breaks. And the reason it breaks is psychological and institutional. In the authoritarian phase, criticism is forbidden.
You see, during the rise, the critics are heroes. They’re valued because they help the system improve.
In the collapse phase, those same critics are treated as traitors. The whistleblowers, the truth-tellers, the reformers, they become the enemy. That’s when your youtube videos get taken down, or you are arrested for saying something naughty on facebook. And when a society silences those who can see what’s coming, it blinds itself. That’s why it’s never prepared for the storm when it finally arrives.
So that’s the analytical model, the map we’re working with. And we can use it to understand both the past and the present, and even to make predictions about the near future.
Now, I’ll give you my predictions for the next five to ten years, not because I claim to be a prophet, but because any theory worth using should make testable forecasts. If these things happen, we can say the model has some merit. If not, we refine it.
So, here’s what I think is coming for the Western world, particularly the United States and Europe.
First, we’ll see the decline of democracy and freedom.
Remember, openness defines the rise phase. But as decline sets in, societies become bureaucratic, and eventually authoritarian. The pattern is already visible, the growing use of force, censorship, surveillance, and the erosion of civic trust.
Second, economic collapse.
As freedom and opportunity narrow, people disengage. They stop believing in the system. Productivity falls. The economy stagnates. The elites, desperate to maintain control, double down on extraction instead of reform.
Third, mass immigration.
When the system falters and locals lose faith, governments look elsewhere for labour and growth. “If our people won’t work,” they say, “we’ll bring in others who will.” But this demographic patch doesn’t solve the structural problem, it deepens social division.
Fourth, civil conflict.
Those divisions, economic, ethnic, ideological, harden into open hostility. Groups begin turning on each other. Street violence, political polarization, fragmentation of identity, all symptoms of a society in late decline.
And finally, fifth, foreign wars.
When domestic tensions reach breaking point, leaders do what leaders have always done, they look outward. War becomes the perfect distraction, a way to redirect anger, unite people temporarily against an external “enemy,” and postpone the reckoning at home.
So when faced with the choice between war and revolution, the establishment will always choose war.
Now, I’m not saying these events happen in a neat sequence, they overlap, they feed into each other. But taken together, they mark the final stage of decline.
And I’ll say it again, there’s no moral judgement here. This isn’t about right or wrong, it’s about understanding how power behaves. Because if we can understand the machinery of collapse, maybe, just maybe, we can redesign it.
I don’t know if I’m right. Maybe tomorrow, Trump, Putin, and Xi will hold hands, sing Kumbaya, and declare world peace, in which case, fantastic, I’ll be delighted to be wrong.
But until that happens, what I’m trying to do is offer you a framework, a lens for understanding how the world really works. And once we understand that, we can start asking the deeper question: can we build something better, before the next collapse?
Now, those three cores of Finance, Religion, and Intelligence, have kept civilisation humming along nicely (and occasionally exploding) for a few thousand years. Between them, they’ve managed to invent war, debt, organised faith, and the modern advertising industry. You’d think that would be enough meddling for one species.
But no. Humanity, being the overachiever it is, decided it wasn’t satisfied merely controlling information. We wanted to automate it. To build something that could out-think us, out-work us, and ideally remind us when our parking permit expires.
Now, if you thought Intelligence was the last stop on the line, I’m afraid the train has one more platform to hit, and it’s electric. We’ve entered the era of The State of the Art, where technology moves so fast that by the time you’ve finished reading the manual, it’s already been declared obsolete.
Once, inventions made us feel clever. Fire. The wheel. The toaster. Each new thing said, “Well done, humanity, you’ve levelled up.”
Now the inventions turn around, pat us on the head, and say, “That’s adorable, but we’ll take it from here.”
The great irony of progress is that it seems determined to progress without us. Machines now do our shopping, finish our sentences, and, in some cases, write our essays (not this one, obviously, this was lovingly crafted by hand, like artisan bread).
We used to use technology to think faster. Now we use it so we don’t have to think at all.
And disturbingly, it’s better at that than we ever were.
Artificial Intelligence has joined the old power family. Finance makes money out of belief. Religion makes belief out of mystery. Intelligence makes truth out of information.
And AI? AI makes sense out of nonsense, or at least nonsense that sounds convincing enough to make you doubt your own memory.
“State of the art” used to mean the best we can do. Now it means the latest thing we’ll regret buying next Tuesday. Every shiny update arrives with the same unspoken message: “Congratulations! You’re already behind.”
So we run.
Civilisation is sprinting on a treadmill that never stops accelerating, while tech companies cheer from the sidelines and sell us smarter running shoes.
And yet, beneath all this digital brilliance, the machinery of our modern miracles still comes down to something refreshingly old-fashioned, dirt.
Lithium, cobalt, copper, rare earth metals, dug out of the ground by people who probably can’t afford the gadgets they’re dying to supply.
For something called artificial intelligence, it’s got a very natural addiction to rocks.
Meanwhile, the “cloud” that’s supposed to float serenely above us is really a cluster of sweaty computer warehouses consuming more power than small countries. Every time you ask your AI to write a limerick about the moon, somewhere in Iceland a data centre wheezes and asks for a bigger generator.
If hypocrisy could generate electricity, Silicon Valley would have solved climate change decades ago.
So yes, every miracle has its receipts. The more intelligence we automate, the more energy, minerals, and moral gymnastics it costs to keep the lights on. The cleverer our systems get, the dumber our excuses sound.
But here’s the truly brilliant twist. All this automation hasn’t freed us, it’s relieved us of remembering how to do things. We’ve outsourced not just labour, but understanding. Your grandparents could fix a car with a spanner and some enthusiasm. We stare blankly at a rectangle that’s frozen mid-update and says “Do not turn off power.”
That’s the human condition in 2025, technologically magnificent, spiritually buffering. Somewhere along the way, we stopped being the masters of our tools and became their slightly nervous students. AI doesn’t rule by force or faith, it rules by helpfulness. It doesn’t need obedience, just usage. Every time you click “I agree,” it grows a little smarter and you grow a little lazier.
This is the fourth core of power, Cognition, the control of thought itself.
Finance owns your wallet. Religion owns your soul. Intelligence owns your newsfeed. But Cognition, the baby of the family, owns you, from the inside out.
It doesn’t care what you believe, only that you keep believing in it.
Your phone is the altar, your password is the prayer, and your data is pretty much everything.
Still, for all its cleverness, AI remains gloriously dependent. Pull the plug, and the gods fall silent.
Electricity is its oxygen, the minerals its bones and our naive attention is its heartbeat.
So perhaps the real “state of the art” isn’t the machine at all, but the stubborn human habit of asking, “Hang on, who’s actually in charge here?”
Because the moment we stop asking that, we’ll have our answer.
Special thanks to Professor Jiang Xueqin for his remarkable account and insight into Civilisation