Experienced?

A healthy system rarely needs to shout. It grows complexity in silence, nourishes dissent without collapse, and tolerates ambiguity because it trusts its capacity to adapt. When systems become brittle, however, they begin to ossify around templates—rubrics of deterministic, historical certainty, slogans that substitute for creative or individual thought, and pageantry that masks—and all while vigorously dissimulating—intellectual exhaustion. Those who ascend in such climates are not necessarily strategic visionaries, but custodians of an accelerating confusion. Their rigidity is not a sign of strength but of incapacity—an inability to improvise without the safety of coercive repetition.

What emerges, then, is not rule but reaction—a fragile shell of authority that survives only through the fear it provokes and the silence it cultivates. These systems reproduce not because they are admired, but because they have colonised the attentional bandwidth of entire populations. People watch, wait, whisper. They try to outlast the storm without drawing its eye. In such moments, the system appears to have a leader, but what it truly has is a gravitational well—an attractor of anxious passivity and compulsive performance. It is not a person, but a pattern, and it feeds on what it cannot understand.

The irony is that this pattern might just as easily collapse under the weight of its own monotony—entropy disguised as structure. It does not require a revolution, only the slow reintroduction of alternate rhythms: unexpected laughter, unapologetic art, quiet refusal, and the deliberate refusal to mirror the spectacle. A better future rarely begins with a bang. It begins when people stop mistaking silence for stability and begin to speak—not to the system, but around it, across it, and through it.