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Break the spell of complexity.

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

There is a planet with enough food, water, and energy to sustain every organism on it comfortably.

It doesn’t.

About eight billion of them live on it. A few thousand control the decisions. Not because they are stronger or smarter — they’re not. But because roughly two hundred years ago, a small group worked out how to make trust into a product they owned . Before that, trust was a community thing. After that, it was a ledger entry. Whoever held the ledger decided who ate.

They built the ledger on the bodies of the people they captured and forced to work. The bodies were used as collateral for loans . When the loans were called in and the bodies were freed, the same bankers were paid compensation — by the state — for the inconvenience of losing their collateral . The freed people got nothing.

With that capital, the same network funded two world wars . They designed the central bank that financed the first one. They rebuilt the industrial base that fought the second one. They ran the pardons that returned the men who ran the death camps to corporate leadership . Then they took the postwar reconstruction contracts.

At no point was anyone indicted .

They then took the retirement savings of the workers — the guaranteed pension that had existed since the Roman legions — and replaced it with a product that only grows if the war machine grows . They made this compulsory. They called it ownership. The people who designed this kept their own guaranteed pensions .

So now every worker on the planet, in order to eat when they are old, needs Lockheed Martin to get bigger. Needs BP to extract more. Needs JPMorgan to keep clearing. The survival of the individual is structurally tied to the expansion of the machine.

Right now, today, a parliament voted to permanently merge two militaries — one of which is being investigated for genocide — into a single weapons procurement and intelligence system. The vote was sponsored by the companies that make the weapons. The money to fund the operation runs through bonds approved by one unelected man in Dublin, who has the legal power to stop it and chooses not to . The workers’ pension funds hold the shares. The workers don’t know.

The aliens would probably ask: why don’t they just stop?

And the answer is: the spell is the complexity. The mechanism was deliberately made incomprehensible so that the people paying for it would not be able to name what they were paying for . You can’t stop what you can’t see. You can’t see what you’ve never been given the words for. And the words were deliberately withheld — from the schools, from the financial system, from the news — because naming it clearly would be the end of it.

That’s the whole problem.

A species that has the capacity to feed, house, and protect every one of its members — choosing not to, at scale, by design, for the profit of a few hundred families whose names appear on the same ledger entries across two hundred years.

The only thing standing between that and change is language. Enough people, at once, saying the plain true words.