Civilisation was never meant to run on panic, yet that is the rhythm we’ve drifted into. The public story insists we are building a future, but the machinery underneath tells a different tale — one of shortening time-horizons, defensive accumulation, and a cultural field tuned to performance rather than survival. The great systems of finance, politics, and technology no longer reward foresight; they reward velocity. They amplify whoever can extract fastest, signal loudest, and defend their position with the least reflection. What passes for strategy is often just competitive insecurity wearing a suit.
Money sits at the centre of this distortion. Not because wealth is inherently corrupting, but because we’ve mistaken a narrow metric for a universal map. We compress ecological limits, social cohesion, and thermodynamic reality into a single number, then behave as though that number is the world itself. In that contraction, coherence dissolves. The incentives drift. The system selects for actors who treat civilisation as expendable because the dashboard tells them they’re winning. A few still think beyond the next quarter or the next symbolic victory, but they operate out of phase with a culture that confuses liquidity for longevity. The deeper truth is simple: our real constraint is not capital — it is coherence, and we are spending it faster than we can regenerate it.
Daedelus Kite 