Garbage in, garbage out. The more those who pull the strings isolate themselves, the farther they get from reality and the greater the probability that their models collapse. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
Every nation is operating on models that are collapsing without those at the controls being aware that the implicit assumptions of their models no longer map reality.
A recent article lays out the collapse of the dominant geopolitical model of “rising powers generate conflict”: The Stagnant Order And the End of Rising Powers (Foreign Affairs, paywalled). The basic idea is that the foundations of “rising powers”–demographics and productivity gains–no longer support grandiose planetary dominance.
Rather, demographics is already baked in as a crushing liability to all existing powers, and despite endless claims that technology will jumpstart productivity, the reality is productivity gains have flatlined for decades. “Growth” is a function of expanding debt, not productivity gains.
This dynamic extends beyond geopolitical models: all the models being used to explain and control the world are all collapsing: economic, social, political, they’re all collapsing because they are all constructs assembled in eras that no longer map the present.
As I explained in The Entire Bubble Economy Is a Hallucination, models collapse because of two limitations that define all models:
1. All models are self-referential, as they “train” (i.e. generate current analysis) on a limited spectrum of metrics that are presumed to summarize the immensely complex “real world.” The model is blind to its own self-referential feedback loop and the limits of the metrics it bases its output on.
Over time, this self-referential “training” degrades the output–the analysis and the decisions based on that analysis–to the point of hallucination: the model is generating output of how the world works that has drifted to far from authentic understanding that it is a hallucination, one that is taken to be “real” by those controlling the model.
