When intelligent beings face systemic breakdown - where poor management erodes belief in foundational dreams - they tend to stabilize toward several archetypal patterns:
Fragmentation and Tribal Reformation Intelligence doesn't disappear; it reorganizes. People break into smaller, more coherent groups around shared micro-visions that feel achievable. These become testing grounds for rebuilding trust in collective capability.
Return to First Principles There's often a gravitational pull back to fundamental questions: What actually works? What creates real value? What can we prove rather than just believe? This manifests as a shift from abstract ideology toward empirical validation.
Emergence of Alternative Systems New organizing structures arise organically - often starting as informal networks that prove their worth through results rather than promises. These tend to be more modular, adaptive, and failure-tolerant than what they replace.
Individual Sovereignty with Selective Cooperation Intelligent actors become more discriminating about where they invest their energy and trust. They maintain independence while forming strategic alliances around specific, measurable objectives.
Focus on Infrastructure Over Ideology Energy shifts toward building reliable, composable tools and systems rather than grand narratives. The emphasis becomes creating conditions where good things can emerge rather than trying to control outcomes. The pattern seems to be: when top-down coherence fails, intelligence stabilizes through bottom-up reconstruction, starting with what can be verified and building outward from there.
When everything of value is tokenized and traded directly, what narratives will combine to become the stable representation of value to society?
You have to be able to sell the dream before you can dream up the engineering. Lose your ego, don't write to be right, write to discover where your perspective needs to be adjusted to reveal the truth.