The audio above is an AI-generated 'podcast' crafted with careful prompting and highly selected data sources. You can view the prompt here. The podcast goes into more detail than the overview post below. Full references are at the end of the post. Prefer reading or listening? Now you can choose!
The Overwhelm Problem
You’ve been paying attention to what’s happening in the world. And you feel overwhelmed by it all. Natural disasters take innocent lives in a cruel twist of climate revenge. The government has more power than ever before. Giant tech companies know everything about us. The financial system seems rigged. War and rumors of war.
You’ve heard people talk about building alternatives, but it feels impossible - like trying to replace an airplane wing while mid-flight.
More and more I’ve become convinced that we don’t need to fix anything because it’s already fixing itself. Maybe not in an elegant way, but in the way that broken systems always do. They collapse under their own weight and something new emerges from the pieces.
I don’t think this is wishful thinking. It’s how big change has always come about over long periods of history. The current system contains the seeds of its own destruction, and all we need to do is be ready with something better when it falls apart.
“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”—Milton Friedman, 1982 - as quoted in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.
How Systems Really Change
The German philosopher Hegel figured out something important about how change works. He called it the dialectic. Very simply it’s when two opposing forces fight against each other. Eventually they both lose and something entirely new pops up.
Think of it like two people in a tug-of-war. Eventually, either the rope breaks or someone lets go, and both people fall backward. In the meantime, disinterested bystanders were working together on an entirely different game.
This is what’s happening with our economic and political systems right now. Mainly the US, but the same applies in every country that participates in our globalized civilization. Two major forces are pulling in opposite directions, and the rope is about to break.
“The Hegelian Dialectic is renowned for its triadic structure: Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. But what does that really mean? In simple terms, the thesis represents the current state of affairs — a concrete reality or existing condition. The antithesis is the direct opposition to the thesis; it’s abstract, hypothetical, and not grounded in reality. Think of the antithesis as the challenge or contradiction that arises against the established thesis. The synthesis is where things get interesting. It’s the process of reconciling the thesis and antithesis by integrating their truths into a new, more refined state of affairs. This new synthesis then becomes the new thesis, setting the stage for another cycle of dialectical progression.” — Michael Filimowicz, PhD in Hegelian Dialectic for Dummies
The Two Competing Forces
Force One: Government Digital Currency (The Control System)
Governments around the world want to create digital currencies so that they can control their citizens. These Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) would let them track every dollar you spend, control what you can buy, and even turn off your money if they don’t like what you’re doing.
This is the ultimate control system. Combined with the massive surveillance network that’s been built up since 9/11, it would give governments total power over people’s lives. Every transaction would be monitored, every purchase approved or denied, every person tracked in real-time. This is no conspiracy theory. It’s been published in multiple publicly available reports.
Force Two: Private Digital Money (The Elite System)
On the other side, you have billionaires and big tech companies pushing their own digital currencies. These stablecoins would be controlled by private companies instead of governments. Think of it as Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk having the power to create money instead of the Federal Reserve.
This system promises freedom from government control, but it just replaces government control with corporate control. A small group of tech billionaires would have even more power than they do now.
Why Both Systems Will Fail
When we look back through history (through the lens of Cliodynamics) we can confidently predict that both of these systems are doomed to fail. That’s because they contain internal contradictions that will tear them apart.
When people start to feel the game is rigged, the social contract begins to break. One group starts blaming another, the center doesn’t hold, extremes become louder, and moderate voices are drowned out by ideological rigidity. These are not isolated incidents. They are markers of internal decay.
“A society does not ever die ‘from natural causes,’ but always dies from suicide or murder—and nearly always from the former.” — D. C. Somervell, frequently incorrectly attributed to Arnold Toynbee
The Control Problem
The government system (CBDCs) will fail because people hate being controlled. When governments get too heavy-handed, people rebel. It’s happened throughout history. The more control they try to exert, the more people resist.
Plus, the government system is incredibly complex. It requires massive computer networks, perfect coordination between agencies, and trust from the population. Complex systems are fragile - one major failure and the whole thing collapses.
The Trust Problem
The private system (billionaire money) will fail because people don’t trust billionaires to control their money. Why would you want Jeff Bezos deciding whether you can buy groceries?
Private systems also compete with each other. Instead of one stable system, you get multiple competing currencies, which creates chaos instead of order. And when people lose trust in one system, they lose trust in all of them.
The Technical Problem
Both systems have the same technical weakness: they depend on massive amounts of energy, complex computer networks, and perfect operation 24/7. They’re fragile in the same way that a house of cards is fragile - impressive when it works, but one glitch brings the whole thing down. During the final phases of an empire, the elite class tend to (hubristically) overlook complexities like this, and that’s when everything comes crashing down. History is full of examples of powerful leaders who made silly mistakes.
What Emerges From the Chaos
When both systems fail (and they will), what emerges isn’t chaos (although sometimes there is a period of discontinuity, like The Great Depression of the 1930s). It’s something that combines the best of both while avoiding their weaknesses. This is what Hegel called the ‘synthesis.’
The synthesis is already happening in communities around the world. It's called mutual credit, and it works like this:
Instead of someone at the top controlling the money (government or billionaire), communities create their own money based on their actual ability to provide goods and services to each other. It’s like a sophisticated barter system where everyone keeps track of what they owe and what they’re owed.
Why This Works
Mutual credit systems have several advantages:
They’re based on real value (actual goods and services) instead of debt or speculation
They’re controlled by the people who use them instead of distant authorities
They’re simple and robust instead of complex and fragile
They work better during crises because communities pull together instead of falling apart
None of this is theoretical. The WIR Bank in Switzerland has been running a mutual credit system for 90 years. It now includes 50,000 businesses and handles over 1.4 billion francs annually. During economic crises, it actually grows stronger because people rely more on their local community. Other examples include the Mumbuca in Brazil, Bangla-Pesa in Kenya and South Africa, BerkShares in Massachusetts, USA, Sardex in Sardinia, and many others.
The Consciousness Shift
What’s really happening isn’t just an economic change—it’s a consciousness change. There is a slow but accelerating awareness that the current system has reached its sell-by date. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions around the world are starting to imagine alternatives.
This is how all major changes happen. First, people change how they think about things. Then they change how they act. Then institutions change to match the new thinking and acting.
We’re in the middle of this process right now. We know the old system is collapsing, and the new one is emerging. But it’s easy to become impatient and to try and “fix the system.” This is another form of hubris. We cannot “fix” a system that has been in development for at least 377 years. We must exercise patience and allow the system to run its course. There is no question this will happen. History tells us this. The question is whether we’ll be ready when it does happen.
"Evolution is always on our side with its beautiful principle that in the face of death or extinction all organisms and species become creative to find options for survival."—Glenn Sankatsing in Quest to Rescue Our Future
What This Means for You
If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the size of the problems we face (I know I have at times), we can relax. We don’t need to fix anything. The system is already fixing itself by collapsing under its own contradictions.
What you need to do is prepare for what comes next.
Build Local Connections
Get to know your neighbors. Build relationships with local businesses. Create networks of trust in your community. These relationships are the foundation of mutual credit systems.
Learn About Alternatives
Study how mutual credit works. Look into time banks, local currencies, and community-supported agriculture. These are the building blocks of the new system.
If you’re fortunate enough to enjoy wealth, learn what a Global Currency Reset might mean. Study what happens when a monetary state of emergency is declared. A good place to start is to learn what happened when Franklin Roosevelt passed the Emergency Banking Relief Act on March 9, 1933 in an “attempt to stabilize the banking system.” (Covered in the Podcast above and the References below).
Learn about a State of Emergency and find out how many your country currently has active (the US has 48 as of this writing). Watch for the weak signals that provide warnings of a Monetary State of Emergency. Have an action plan in place for when it does happen (because it has to).
Don't Accept the Top-Down Solutions
When the current system collapses, powerful people will try to push their solutions on you. We don’t know whether it will be a government digital currency or private billionaire money. Say no. These are just new versions of the old control systems, this time backed by well-funded surveillance companies like Palantir.
There’s a cruel irony in how this collapse will unfold: the more wealth you have, the harder it will be to make a rational decision when the moment comes. If you have money in the bank or crypto, stocks in your portfolio, or gold in your safe, you’ll watch it all become worthless overnight. In that moment of panic, when everything you’ve worked for seems to be evaporating, the top-down offering will look like a lifeline. It will seem rational to grab onto whatever solution is being offered, even if it’s just another form of control. This is by design—the system creates the crisis that makes people desperate enough to accept the “solution.” The wealthier you are in the old system, the more you’ll have to lose, and the more tempting it will be to trade your freedom for the promise of getting some of your wealth back.
Trust the Process
Change is hard and scary, but it’s also natural and inevitable. Systems that don’t serve people eventually die and are replaced by systems that do. This has happened throughout history, and it’s happening again now. It’s easy to lose faith when we see so much going wrong. But trust the process.
“The fundamental mistake that people make when examining what is “wrong” with a non-adaptive system is to try and change, modify or improve upon it. Such a move is a grave error, and not in keeping with the energy and daring nature of the original founders. Instead, the move today is to prototype an evolutionary step-change that does not try to correct anything. Looked at from the perspective of an evolutionary process, what we see is the experiment in American Democracy going through a necessary period of creative collapse.” — Gunther Sonnenfeld, 2016
The Bottom Line
The system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as it’s supposed to. It’s transcending itself by creating its own collapse, which will clear the way for something better.
Your job isn’t to fight the system or fix it. Your job is to be ready with alternatives when it falls apart. And those alternatives already exist—they’re growing in communities around the world, waiting for their moment.
The future isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you participate in creating. But you don’t have to create it from scratch. You just have to be ready to step into it when the time comes.
That time is coming soon. The system is conspiring to transcend itself, and all you have to do is be ready to help it along.
References
Hegelian Dialectics views history as a process driven by contradictions that ultimately lead to higher forms of truth and consciousness. Deep dive: https://bit.ly/Heg-Dia
States of Emergency as Pathway to an Administrative State lays out the legal Trojan Horse developments that over time have shifted normal democratic governance towards emergency rule. Deep dive: https://bit.ly/4lAIIXi. Includes:
1917 Trading With the Enemy Act
1933 Emergency Banking Relief Act
1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act
2001 PATRIOT Act
2012 National Defense Authorization Act
2025 Economic Emergency to Address Trade Deficits
The 2030 Thesis - CBDCs: Central Bank Digital Currencies are virtual money backed and issued by a central bank. As of 2025, 137 countries & currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are exploring a CBDC. In May 2020 that number was only 35. Currently, 72 countries are in the advanced phase of exploration—development, pilot, or launch. Deep dive: https://bit.ly/c-b-d-c
The 2030 Antithesis - PIDCs: A Privately-Issued Digital Currency is a digital currency issued and managed by a private entity—such as a corporation, consortium, or decentralized organization—rather than a government or central bank. Deep dive: https://bit.ly/p-i-d-c
The 2030 Synthesis - Mutual Credit is a form of money in which users pay each other using a system of debits and credits. Within such a payment system, there is no need for cash or banks. Deep dive: https://bit.ly/Mut-Cred
Cliodynamics treats history as science. It is a transdisciplinary area of research that integrates cultural evolution, economic history, macrosociology, the mathematical modeling of historical processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases. Deep dive: https://bit.ly/ClioDyn
Hubris is a dangerous quality that emboldens the elite class to take risks beyond what is appropriate for their situation. They do not stop to think through consequences. Very often, hubris leads to the Progress Trap, which is when they inadvertently introduce problems they do not have the desire to solve. Deep dive: https://bit.ly/HubrisExplained
377 Years refers to the length of time the current globalized empire has been in existence, since its emergence in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. Deep dive: https://bit.ly/7-Phases-Glo
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