Monday, January 26, 2026

A Grand Unifying Theory: Overview

This post is one of six posts in a series on this topic. The full list of posts are linked here for convenience.

The world is becoming a more dangerous place due to a combination of extreme wealth inequality, public corruption, escalating violence and a disconnect between public policy and social needs for health, safety and privacy. The world has never existed in a state where steady progress was occurring in all areas of concern across all societies and economies at the same time. However, the current environment seems uniquely dysfunctional and dangerous because many crucial systems and relationships seem to be worsening simultaneously, across the entire world.

The sense of confusion and disorientation felt by citizens is obviously driven by a lack of familiarity with key historical events over the past fifty to one hundred years. It is also driven by a lack of vocabulary and concepts to use to explain WHY some events occurred in the past and why others that occurred in the past and went away are coming back.

Amid the current turmoil, it seems like most discussions on halting the current decline and returning to a path of improvement involve one of two approaches:

  • Rollback -- Rolling the clock backwards decades to some magical, mythical time where everything was simpler and everything will return to "normal".
  • Course Corrections -- Making a few minor corrections and "investing in the future" will correct the most crucial problems allowing everything to move towards some better state.

The reality is there is no viable answer in either of those extremes. Rolling back to some prior state merely moves the clock backward to a prior state that PRODUCED the current flawed state and likely regenerate all of the conflicts that led TO the current flawed state without improvement. A course correction approach fails to recognize that the mechanisms of the current state are well understood by special interests controlling government and media and those forces have perfected strategies for preventing any change to the status quo that would reduce their wealth and power. In short, efforts to just pitch optimism and "investment" will not CORRECT the imbalances of power or wealth crippling society, such efforts will MAGNIFY them.

The real problem is that it is very difficult to explain to the average citizen that neither of those two extremes represents an optimal path forward. Understanding WHY those simple solutions need to be rejected requires significantly more understanding of a wide variety of concepts. The vast majority of the population lacks this foundational understanding, either because educational systems failed to provide it or the world looked so bright mere decades ago that societies felt no need to educate their citizens about prior failures and how those problems were temporarily held at bay.

What will be presented in this series might be wryly described as a "grand unifying theory" of human advancement, economics, politics and corruption. These basic forces and their interactions will be described, then mapped to a handful of specific topics in the news then mapped to a smaller set of key takeaways about incorporating this theory into choosing paths to a better future. Visually, the outline of this series looks like this:

This visual reinforces how different processes begin influencing nearby related processes in a bi-directional way. When considered in an optimistic sense, those bi-directional flows are synergies which compound over time and create exponential improvements. But many processes that can GROW exponentially can also DECLINE exponentially when required inputs are missing or different inputs are provided.

These particular forces were chosen for analysis because they all contribute to exponential change over time. They are all also difficult to measure or model mathematically with precision. That makes them perfect fodder for debates that can never be definitively won or lost. But that imprecision doesn't make the relationships less important when considering policy, it simply increases the level of self-serving rhetoric that must be stripped away from most discussions of the topics before a more accurate picture can be obtained.

Between the analysis of the individual components and the "case studies" drawn from current events, some additional generalizations come to mind:

  • These problems do not represent random, short term glitches in the behaviors of existing economic, social and political systems. There is no simple fix for the glitch that rolls back the clock fifteen years to a more equitable set of circumstances that allows a resumption of a prior status quo.
  • These problems directly result from inequalities of power and wealth that are used to distort existing systems of law enforcement and political influence in favor of those already holding out-sized shares of power.
  • Once a particular incarnation of economic control, law enforcement and politics becomes compromised, it becomes less likely that system can be corrected while remaining essentially in place. Those playing the game come to know the rules so well that the game itself becomes tilted in favor of those setting the rules.

The goal of this series is to provide a grounding in some of the most important concepts of economics and the behavior of organizations in a society, reinforce those concepts and vocabulary by applying them to examples from current events, then provide final takeaways that allow individuals to better spot actors that are attempting to manipulate the status quo for private gain and better evaluate solutions as they are presented for setting a better direction going forward.


WTH
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