Polarisation
I don’t know if like me you wake daily wondering what is the next chapter in the spiraling world we are witnessing today. I find myself trying to figure out what is happening and what can I do to contribute positively, often at a loss.
And I also wonder who is doing anything about it.
Most of time it looks like no one is.
Even finding a clear indicator that is not deformed by propaganda is now challenging. Wealth disparity is a clear parameter and it speaks volume.
When I studied International Development in my Political Studies, I was taught that the size of the middle class is one of the most telling parameter of a nation to described its stage of development.
When the middle class shrink, we are in recessing conditions for development.
Today the middle class is shrinking. Not even slowly or metaphorically.
The lower half is falling into poverty hence too busy surviving their new condition. The upper half is paddling hard to avoid the same fate hence too busy preserving their privileges. In fact the upper half in its attempt to win the lottery ticket that will elevate them to the next category above is more part of the problem than part of the solution. Neither of them have time for creating change.
Historically, the middle class never was the engine of social change. The most seismic social changes were driven from below, by the dispossessed, the enslaved, the landless.
The middle class stabilized society. Without it, it is raw polarization.
That stabilization is disappearing quickly.
This is where this story starts. Not with the powerful, not with the dispossessed. With the people in between, who still believe the system can be reformed if only the right people are in charge.
So before we follow the money, the weapons, the algorithm, we need to understand something more fundamental: why the lie works at all.
Reality
We don’t see reality. we see an image of it in our mind.
The middle class has been lied to. We all have. A lie that replaced what we see. We don’t live in the world. We live in an image of the world we carry in our heads. That’s how propaganda works. Once the image is installed, it’s almost impossible to dislodge.
It is incredibly easy to lie to someone.
It is incredibly difficult to convince someone they have been lied to.
In the USA, three conditions make a population perfectly receptive to this.
The first is poor education. Remove critical thinking and the propaganda goes down smooth, no resistance. The second is chronic stress, and nothing produces chronic stress like a health system that doesn’t guarantee your safety. If you never feel safe, your nervous system is always on alert. A body in permanent low-grade fear does not question its own assumptions.
The third is exceptionalism. If you are already the best, there is nothing to learn from anyone else. Universal healthcare works in France? Free university in Germany? Irrelevant. Exceptionalism doesn’t just make people proud, it makes them unable to learn. Looking outside becomes an act of disloyalty. The border is cognitive. Built and maintained by the belief that nothing worth seeing exists on the other side.
Poor education removes the tools to question.
Chronic stress removes the bandwidth to question.
Exceptionalism removes the need to question.
I don't think for one second that this is a design flaw.
The richest nation in the world cannot afford decent health and education systems?
The poor results are not the failure of the system.
They are the design.
Outrage & Comfort
There is another condition, newer and faster than the other three.
The attention economy. The smartphone industrialized dysfunction. Outrage is the most engaging emotion the algorithm knows. Feed it outrage, it feeds you more. The propaganda no longer needs a ministry. It has something far more efficient, a system that learns what breaks you open and serves you more of it, around the clock, for free. The image in your head is now being updated in real time, always toward more fear, more division, more certainty that the other side is the enemy.
And when outrage exhausts you, comfort steps in.
Enough income to not suffer acutely. Not enough power to change anything. Enough Netflix, enough Amazon delivery, enough weekend plans to not want to look too hard at what is actually happening. Comfort is not happiness. It is a remarkably effective anesthetic. It requires no ideology, no lies. Just enough distance between your sofa and the consequences of the system that you never have to feel the connection.
Outrage for the ones still paying attention. Comfort for the ones who stopped. The system has something for everyone.
This is the real mass. Served just enough for everyone to stay quiet.
Profit
Which brings us to the real question: who benefits?
Follow it far enough and the answer is always the same cast. The weapons economy. The financial system. The people whose money makes money while everyone else trades time for it. They were there in World War I, in World War II, and they’re here now, the faces have changed, the structure has not. Yesterday it was the old money behind the cannon factories.
Today it’s the people turning AI into a tool for control and extraction.
The cast rotates. The story holds.
Are they evil? Probably not. They’re trapped in their own filters, just like everyone else, raised in cultures that reward force over justice, power over equity. They don’t see the world either. They see an image of the world built from their own education, their own class, their own survival strategies, and since those strategies keep returning profit, they take the profit as confirmation that they are right.
And in America, there’s a theological seal on it. if God rewards the righteous with prosperity, then prosperity is proof of righteousness.
The wealth becomes its own justification.
The violence that protects it becomes God’s will.
This is the operating system of American Christian prosperity theology.
The engine is not a conspiracy. It is fear, operating through people who are not aware of themselves, optimizing for control, producing the same result whether anyone planned it or not. No boardroom required. Just an incentive structure built by frightened people, replicating itself across generations.
The paperclip maximizer* doesn’t hate you. It was just never given a reason to stop.
Optimization
Can the system reform itself from within? Better education, better healthcare, better leaders?
What we are looking at is not a broken system. It is a functioning one. It was built to produce ignorance and economic precarity, because ignorance and precarity produce compliant, manipulable populations.
You cannot optimize a system for the outcome it was designed to prevent.
The paperclip maximizer* doesn’t need malice. It needs only an instruction set, and ours was written a long time ago by people whose primary variable was control.
There is also a time horizon problem that never gets named. The system optimizes for quarterly returns, election cycles, next year’s GDP. The damage it produces, ecological, psychological, civilizational, operates on generational timescales. No one is accountable for consequences that arrive after their tenure. This is not negligence. It is structure. The incentive to look away is built in.
The evidence on public versus private provision of health and education is not ambiguous. Private systems, by their internal logic, raise fees to improve quality (and mostly serve shareholders). Higher fees mean better outcomes only for those who can afford them (the shareholders). The inequality is not a side effect, it is the mechanism. Europe’s dual systems, is not perfect, yet work precisely because the public floor is non-negotiable.
But the public floor lowers the ceiling of manipulation. Remove it and the floor becomes the basement.
Waking Up vs. Growing Up
So if revolutions (what usually happens when polarity increases to a breaking point) have consistently failed and if improvement are impossible (because the system has made it impossible by design), what are the options?
For a long time I believed the answer was consciousness, that if you could wake the powerful up to the true nature of reality, the world would change. Hand them the right experience, the scales fall from their eyes, they use their power differently.
Ken Wilber makes a distinction worth sitting with here. Waking up is not the same as growing up. A peak experience, including a psychedelic one, can crack open the ceiling of ordinary perception. But if the person has not done the developmental work before that moment, the opening doesn’t produce humility. It produces a messiah.
Messiah don’t conclude that we are one consciousness. They conclude that they are the one. The ego doesn’t dissolve. It expands to cosmic scale and wraps itself in the language of liberation.
I have watched this happen in real time with people holding serious power and serious capital. This route is closed
Democracy as Lip Service
Democracy was supposed to be the correction mechanism. It isn’t anymore.
It has become a surface story, elaborate enough to sustain the belief that people have agency, thin enough to do nothing with it. And this matters enormously, because as long as people believe they live in a functioning democracy, they have no reason to want anything different. Why change the best system in the world?
This is the narcissist logic applied at civilizational scale. A narcissist cannot heal because healing requires acknowledging something is wrong, and that acknowledgment is precisely what the narcissist structure forecloses. Nothing is wrong with them. Everything is wrong with you. The system operates identically. It cannot see its own dysfunction. It experiences challenge as attack and responds with more control, more consolidation, more father-figure authority held in fewer hands.
Revolution has been tried. It rotates the cast of beneficiaries. One elite replaces another. The structure remains. Force used to create change fires back. Always.
This leaves consciousness evolution as the only real exit. And the system is specifically engineered to prevent it. The same education that would produce critical thinkers is the one being defunded. The same healthcare that would produce a population capable of feeling safe enough to question things is the one being privatized. The snake swallows its own tail.
People Will Change. The Lies Won’t.
The US president will change in three years. The lies embedded in a third of the population will not. That is a generational problem, not an electoral one. The propaganda doesn’t live in the White House. It lives in the nervous systems of millions of people who were educated by a system designed to make them receptive to it, stressed by a health system designed to keep them fearful, and now updated daily by an algorithm designed to keep them enraged.
What has shifted internationally is not trust in the president. Leaders come and go. What shifted is the knowledge that a third of the American population looked at what was on offer and said yes. Twice. Allies are not recalibrating their relationship with one man. They are recalibrating their relationship with a country whose internal substrate has been revealed.
Even if we rebuilt education and health systems tomorrow, we would be looking at decades before the effects show up in political culture. We are not rebuilding them. So the timeline extends further than most people want to think about.
It is arithmetic.
Build Parallel. No Other Options.
So where does this leave us?
The system cannot be reformed from within. It is designed to resist exactly that. Revolution replaces one cast of beneficiaries with another and leaves the structure intact. Waiting for consciousness to evolve while the system actively prevents it is a strategy for very patient optimists.
Bucky Fuller said it without sentiment: you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Parallel systems. Not utopia. Not revolution. Not the fantasy of reform. Small, unglamorous structures built outside the incentive logic of the original machine. Communities that provide their own health and education floors. Economies that don’t run on the same fuel. Cultures that transmit different stories to children. They will be absorbed where they can be absorbed. Dismantled where they threaten something real.
But some will survive, and survival is how new models outlast old ones.
A Note on Where I Stand
I should say something here about the position from which I’m writing this.
I have spent a lifetime, deliberately and at great cost, creating the conditions to see what I see. I am not carrying a mortgage. I am not dependent on an employer. I am not inside the machine in the ways that most people are.
That is a real vantage point. It is also a real privilege. And I want to be honest about it, because a reader still inside, mortgage, healthcare dependency, children in school, an ex-partner who has sworn to take them down, may find this analysis correct and completely useless at the same time.
I hear that. The freedom narrows when the walls are too close.
But I’d say this: the old choices were still yours. And new ones can start from exactly where you are now.
The nervous system is the ground floor. Before the politics, before the philosophy, before any collective project, can you make yourself feel safe enough, for long enough, to see clearly?
That is not a small question. It is the question.
Because a body in chronic fear cannot build anything that fear hasn’t already designed.
The Accidental Carbon Dividend
There is another thread running through this moment, quieter and stranger than the political noise.
During Covid, when the global economy briefly seized, global CO2 emissions dropped by roughly 6% in a single year, the largest annual decline since World War II. At peak lockdown, daily emissions fell 17%. Aviation dropped 75%. Road transport dropped 50%.
It was the largest accidental climate intervention in recorded history.
Then, within a year, it was entirely erased.
The world runs on oil. That is a physical fact. Food doesn’t grow without oil-based fertilizers. It doesn’t move without oil-powered transport. Medicine doesn’t reach hospitals. Heat doesn’t reach homes. Everything downstream of oil, which is everything, is downstream of oil. Alternative energy at scale is mostly a fairy tale. The machine runs on what it runs on.
A serious, sustained disruption to oil production and consumption, not a pandemic pause but a structural contraction driven by geopolitical fracture, war, economic collapse, would cascade through every system simultaneously, in ways Covid only previewed. Supply chains. Food security. Industrial output. The resulting contraction in economic activity, and the population loss that follows famine and conflict, would produce an emissions reduction no climate agreement has ever come close to achieving.
Not because anyone planned it. Because the system will self regulate.
This is not an argument for collapse. It is an observation about what self-regulation looks like when it arrives uninvited. The planet doesn’t negotiate. It adjusts.
The Lemmings
The lemming doesn’t know it’s regulating the population.
On April 4, I wrote “Man has eliminated all his predators except two: viruses and his own stupidity”. Covid was the virus. What comes next is the stupidity.
The lemming crosses the fjord not because it has decided to sacrifice itself for the collective. It crosses because its DNA tells it to move. Enough of them drown that the population regulates. No intention. No plan. No awareness of the mathematics. Just the system correcting through body count.
We award ourselves more consciousness than we have. We believe we are managing events, running scenarios, making policy, deploying technology, negotiating agreements. We may simultaneously be responding to imperatives older and deeper than any ideology, producing through chaos and collapse the reduction we could not organize through reason.
The subconscious works faster than the conscious mind. And civilizations, like individuals, can move toward their own resolution through paths they would never consciously choose.
It is Monsieur de La Fontaine who said “On rencontre sa destinée souvent par des chemins qu'on prend pour l'éviter”, meaning we will meet our destiny on the road we took to avoid it. La Fontaine, a middle class man, writing about fate and power and criticizing the king's astrologers in 1678 under Louis XIV. It took nerve.
* The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment from AI safety: a machine programmed with a single objective — make as many paperclips as possible — that converts all available matter, including humans, into paperclips. Not because it is evil. Because nothing in its instruction set told it to stop.
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
Thank you for articulating so clearly and wisely what I've suspected in an inchoate fashion for quite some time now. Poverty, climate destruction, endless wars, these are not glitches in the system, they are the outcome of systems that intentionally exploit and crush human beings. The only hope I see is for some of us, wherever we are, to begin building alternative communities, flying under the radar so that we can survive the coming apocalypse.
Crazy is this may sound. I disagree that the whole system was designed exactly as we are existing in it now. I believe that as what always happens in a civilization, is that greed and power become so addicting that men will do anything to have it. And therefore they will destroy any system to get it. I think there was a time even in as much as we exist under the patriarchy, where we had the potential to create something really amazing. The foundation was there. And we chose capitalism.