People are confused because they keep applying good-faith models to bad-faith systems.
They assume randomness where there is coordination.
Incompetence where there is incentive.
Mistake where there is profit.
Once you swap the mental model, the fog lifts.
The Adversarial Model
Assume global leadership is not a collection of bumbling adults, but a self-preserving, rent-seeking cabal whose only prime directive is continuity of control. Not competence. Not prosperity. Control.
Suddenly:
Inflation isn’t a failure — it’s a wealth extraction protocol
Housing crises aren’t accidents — they’re debt anchors
Endless wars aren’t tragedies — they’re liquidity events
Bureaucratic complexity isn’t inefficiency — it’s attack surface hardening
Moral posturing isn’t hypocrisy — it’s brand management
The system isn’t broken.
It’s operating exactly as designed.
Fiat as a Behavioral Control Layer
Fiat money is not just currency. It’s permissioned reality.
It rewards compliance, punishes savings, and erodes long-term thinking. It turns citizens into quarterly optimizers trapped in survival mode. When time horizons collapse, so does resistance.
From a systems perspective, fiat does three things beautifully:
1. Decouples labor from value
2. Obscures causality
3. Externalizes blame
When things go wrong, no one is responsible — just “the economy”, “market forces”, or “complex global factors”.
Perfect camouflage.
Why Everything Feels Absurd
Because you’re trying to reason with a system that does not optimize for truth.
It optimizes for:
Narrative stability
Institutional survival
Debt expansion
Power concentration
Ethics are a UI layer.
Law is a throttle.
Democracy is a rate limiter.
The confusion people feel is not ignorance — it’s cognitive dissonance from modeling the system incorrectly.
The Punchline
Once you accept the adversarial premise, the chaos stops looking chaotic.
It looks predictable.
Boring.
Almost elegant.
Which is the most disturbing part of all.
Because the moment you see it as a system —
you also see that it can be replaced.
And systems hate nothing more than being understood.
