At every level of power and influence—government, corporate, institutional, cultural—the refusal to admit problems has become the defining problem. The failures are obvious—collapsing ecosystems, hollowed economies, dysfunctional politics—yet they are wrapped in layers of language and ritual designed to deny them. The performance of belief and positivity masks breakdown until the mask itself becomes indistinguishable from reality. Institutions, governments, and corporations persist by failing profitably: displacing costs onto others, externalising damage, surviving on the illusion of continuity. But at a planetary scale there is no “elsewhere” to absorb the cost. The entropy accumulates; the dividend is collapse.
What rises in such systems is not the best but the median of reproduction. It is not virtue, wisdom, or foresight that percolates to the top, but whatever most efficiently replicates itself—structurally, not semantically. This is why denial spreads faster than truth, spectacle faster than substance, cruelty faster than compassion. The logic of self-propagation is indifferent to value and blind to consequence, and so the architecture of constructed failure becomes self-sustaining. People may resist seeing it, but resistance does not alter the trajectory. The momentum is already set, and it is moving us toward catastrophe with a speed that language can neither conceal nor redeem.
Daedelus Kite 