"Our Country Is in Danger:" The Storm on the Horizon

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A reader recently sent me a letter that summarized a sense shared by many: "I can't shake the bad feeling that our country is in danger." I don't think this was a partisan political statement about a political policy; it was a much more comprehensive sense of a storm brewing on the horizon that could shake the foundations of everyday life.

There are several ways to illuminate the dynamics in play.

One is the analogy of the patient brought in for a routine surgical procedure. The patient looks OK but beneath this superficial normalcy, his body's core systems are on the ragged edge of failure: the body's built-in mechanisms of homeostasis have been pushed to their limits. As a result, the routine procedure triggers a response that cascades into multiple organ / system failure and the patient expires.

In other words, trying to fix one thing breaks something else which then unleashes a cascading failure of fragile subsystems, bringing down the entire system.

There are two key points here: one is that all the fragility, brittleness and vulnerability is invisible to everyone, including the patient himself. Only after the collapse can we identify all the fragilities that made collapse inevitable once one element was disrupted.

The second point is that subsystems are tightly bound, meaning that each subsystem is connected to all the other subsystems, and so any disruption in one quickly spreads to the rest. Just as the body's organs and core systems are all tightly bound into one integrated system, so too are the economy and society.

Many of these causal connections are surprising. Only relatively recently have we discovered the critical role played by the digestive system's microbiome, the complex ecosystem of bacteria that break down food into components our bodies need. The microbiome is not just part of the digestive system; it's causally connected to the brain and our mental states, and every other system.

This is why eating junk food without much fiber not only make us physically ill, it's deranging.

Removing the gall bladder is a common procedure, as if the gall bladder was a sort of "we can do without this" organ. But those whose gall bladders have been removed are at much higher risk of diabetes and heart disease than those with functioning gall bladders. (Long-Term Effects of Gallbladder Removal.).

Our reductionist approach to understanding complex systems leads us astray, as we don't fully understand the many connections and feedbacks in systems that operate more like natural ecosystems than machines.

We think we can go in, rip apart one subsystem, insert a new one, get in and get out, and it's all fixed. That's not the way tightly bound systems work. Tearing apart one subsystem may trigger the collapse of the entire system.

To understand the risks of systemic collapse, we have to focus on two things: 1) the ways subsystems are causally linked and 2) the ways subsystems have been hollowed out, debased, stripped of buffers or rendered brittle, all of which make the system prone to breakdown.

Debasement comes in many forms. Ted Gioia performed a profoundly insightful public service in his essay The State of the Culture, 2025, explaining how the Web has been hollowed out and commoditized to the benefit of Big Tech and to the detriment of individuals and the social order, which includes social trust and coherence.

This debasement becomes invisible to those who have known nothing else.

We can understand debasement as the thinning of buffers that protect the system from disruption. Once the buffers have been eroded, the system can break down in ways that surprise us because we don't see the buffers, we only see the surface stability of everyday normal life.

Consider the many debasements hollowing out insurance.

The cost of homeowner insurance doesn't just creep up; the cost jumps higher in leaps and bounds, increasing in multiples of the original cost: $800 a year is now $8,000 a year, or the insurer abandons the market as uninsurable, and insurance is either no longer available or it's insanely costly. So those who can't afford it are uninsured.

In some cases, deductibles soar and the payout for loss is limited to a dollar amount that is only a fraction of the real-world replacement cost of the dwelling.

Healthcare insurance is a minefield of huge deductibles--the customer has to pay large sums out of pocket before insurance enters the picture--and various elements of healthcare are not covered by insurance. These change constantly, generating a very real sense of insecurity.

As a result of this hollowing out / debasement, many forms of insurance are in effect phantom insurance, coverage that has little relation to what was traditionally covered.

Those encountering these hollowed out, debased, shape-shifting subsystems are increasingly radicalized, as the narrative that "all this is standard, completely normal Progress" is jarringly at odds with their lived experience. This inner disconnect between what we experience and what the marketing complex tells us we should be experiencing is called derealization.

Put another way: our lived experience is derealized (dismissed as not real) by narrative control / marketing.

This radicalization triggers a realization that all is not as it is presented, and this is so disturbing that we compartmentalize daily life (everything's good except healthcare). The problem is healthcare isn't an isolated subsystem that has no connection to the larger systems or other subsystems: it's connected to everything else in often pernicious and poorly understood ways.

In some circumstances, it's already clear that the system has already broken down: The Invisible Man: A firsthand account of homelessness in America.

In many ways, the healthcare and food corporations are tightly bound, as the highly processed foods marketed to maximize corporate profits generates the illnesses which the healthcare corporations then exploit to maximize their profits.

This is eerily like Philip K. Dick's dystopian world of an addicted populace living in a system of Total Surveillance, a world in which the corporation profiting from addiction treatment is also growing and processing the hybridized flowers that are the source of the highly addictive drug Substance D: A Scanner Darkly.

So the "self-regulating market" manufactures the food that makes us ill, and then profits from treating the many chronic conditions that are the inevitable result of purposefully addictive food, social media, smartphones, meds, etc.--what I call The Addiction Economy.

The Savior State of planners / managers that's supposed to protect the public has failed to do so, enabling the subprime mortgage "self-regulating market" to destabilize the financial system in ways that have never been truly resolved, and Big Pharma to makes billions of dollars in profits from addictive painkillers that were marketed as non-addictive and therefore "safe."

So we have the worst of both worlds: we live in the "narrative control" totalitarian serfdom foreseen by F.A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) and the ruin wrought by "self-regulating markets" described by Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation).

Healthcare is connected to all sorts of other core systems in the economy and society--for example, housing.

As outlined in this article, the costs of home care for the elderly is so high that inheritances are being consumed, along with home equity: The Crushing Financial Burden of Aging at Home.

In effect, family wealth is being transferred from housing and nest eggs to the healthcare complex, which is increasingly being bought up by private equity, the bleeding edge of "self-regulating markets."

Derealization is just one of five Ds that illuminate the potential for the chaotic breakdown of fragile, debased, hollowed out subsystems which then bring down the entire system.

The other four are: denormalization, decomplexification, decoherence and denial.

The basic idea of denormalization is that all the structures of the "normal" economy only function at full capacity, for as costs have moved higher, unproductive complexity has increased and our ability to pay these higher costs is based on ever-expanding debt.

As a result, "normal" became extremely fragile and binary: it's either fully funded at full capacity or it collapses. The structures of everyday life (to use Braudel's apt phrase) are incapable of downsizing to 80% of their present complexity and cost, much less 50%.

There won't be any "new normal" because the system has become too debased by entrenched interests. It is incapable of reducing complexity and cost, and bailouts via borrowed money are stopgaps, not actual solutions.

Decomplexification is a mouthful, but what it means is everyone inside the machine knows the impossibility of paring organizational complexity. Everyone who is a stakeholder in the status quo (which is virtually every employee, manager, etc.) will fight to keep the status quo intact as is, for fear that any re-organization might imperil their livelihood or security.

Modern life is inherently complex. Democracy is complex and cumbersome because having a bunch of stakeholders all competing for public resources and advocating for a bigger slice of the pie is inherently messy.

Long global supply chains are inherently complex. Managing ever-increasing regulations is inherently complex. And so on.

Once a tightly bound subsystem breaks down, all sorts of complexity elsewhere in the system that was previously viewed as essential crumbles.

Decoherence is an interesting word. In science, "Decoherence can be viewed as the loss of information from a system into the environment, since every system is loosely coupled with the energetic state of its surroundings."

In the context of the economy and society, decoherence refers to the loss of systemic coherence between narratives, values, processes and systems. Simply put, stuff no longer works right and it no longer makes sense.

What worked in the past has been transformed by two systemic drifts:

1. Systems that evolved to function in a specific socio-political-economic context continued adding complexity and cost because debt-based funding was available, not because they were becoming more efficient or effective.

2. The socio-political-economic context has changed and so the status quo systems are mal-adapted, i.e. obsolete.

These two systemic drifts occur so slowly that we aren't even aware of the loss of coherence.

These four Ds help us understand why the status quo is incapable of adapting / evolving fast enough and effectively enough to manage a controlled reduction to a much lower level of cost and complexity.

The fifth D, denial, is our default response to the fear and anxiety generated by disruptive change we don't control. To the degree that denial disconnects us from the real world of feedback, it accelerates the processes of destabilization.

Danger is not limited to external threats such as other nations or asteroids. The dangers posed by self-serving corruption, narrative control as a substitute for real adaptation, subsidizing corruption and malinvestment with debt and the fragility of subsystems that have been hollowed out are all internal dangers.

Very little of what we're constantly told is normal Progress is either normal or Progress. It is the opposite of stability and security, and therefore the opposite of Progress; it's what I call Anti-Progress.

Narrative control--the belief that convincing everyone that everything's under control is the solution--is a higher order of denial. Rather than admit how debased, hollowed out, brittle and fragile "normal life" has become, we pour our effort into convincing ourselves and others that the system is solid, robust, permanent and adaptive, even as the buffers of systemic stability have become paper-thin.

The danger brewing on the horizon is the potential for one subsystem breaking down to cascade into a system-wide breakdown. This is what we sense, without being to identify the specifics of this risk.
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