Reader,
We're in the final stage before collapse. And it's not what you think.
In his research on "The Changing World Order," Ray Dalio identified the cyclical nature of how empires rise and fall. Not through dramatic external conquests, but through predictable internal deterioration. Six stages that repeat like clockwork across centuries:
- New Order Emerges (post-war reconstruction)
- Peace and Prosperity (economic boom, innovation)
- Financial Strain (debt accumulation, overextension)
- Internal Conflict (wealth gaps, political polarization)
- External Wars (resource competition, proxy conflicts)
- Civil War and Collapse (internal order breaks down)
The data shows we're deep in Stage 5, accelerating toward Stage 6.
The Financial Strain indicators:
- US debt-to-GDP ratio: 120% (historically unsustainable)
- Wealth inequality at 1920s levels (Gini coefficient: 0.85)
- Currency debasement accelerating (money printing unprecedented)
- Economic productivity declining despite technological advances
The Internal Conflict indicators:
- Political polarization at Civil War levels (Pew Research: 91% negative views of opposing party)
- Geographic political sorting (85% of counties voted for same party as 2020)
- Media fragmentation creating separate realities
- Institutional trust at historic lows (Congress approval: 21%)
- A political assassination two weeks ago that I think you've heard enough of by now
The External Wars reality:
- Ukraine, Middle East, Taiwan tensions
- Resource competition intensifying
- Alliance structures fracturing
- Nuclear rhetoric normalizing
But here's the part that I find interesting:
Every assassination. Every viral outrage. Every reason they give you to hate your neighbor. It's not organic division arising from legitimate differences.
It's manufactured consent for the final stage.
The uncomfortable truth the powers that be don't want you to see: While you're fighting over scraps, they're hoarding the gold.
The people doing the fighting - left, right, progressive, conservative, urban, rural - are not the ones positioned to win when the system collapses. The winners are the ones who benefit from your division. The ones who profit from chaos. The ones who accumulate assets while you accumulate grievances.
Every empire that has collapsed followed this exact pattern: The populace tears itself apart over increasingly trivial differences while the power structure consolidates control through the chaos.
This is where shadow work becomes survival work.
Carl Jung understood something about human psychology that most political analysts miss: "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
What you hate in "them" - the other political tribe, the other economic class, the other generation - is almost always something you refuse to see in yourself. The greed. The fear. The willingness to sacrifice others for safety. The capacity for violence when threatened.
The system depends on your projection. It dies when you own your shadow.
When you stop seeing enemies "out there" and start seeing the unhealed parts of yourself, you become ungovernable by division. When you recognize that the person across the political aisle is fighting the same fight you are - for dignity, for security, for a future that works - you become immune to manufactured outrage.
This is the sequence that births new worlds:
Integration: You do the shadow work. You own what you've been projecting. You stop hating mirrors of yourself.
Intimacy: You connect soul to soul with people you were taught to fear. Not political connection. Human connection. Heart to heart. The recognition that we're all walking each other home.
Initiation: Integrated people who can be intimate with their shadows and with each other create the conditions for a new world. Holistic. Cooperative. Livable. A world that works because it's built by people who work on themselves.
Every empire that survives its collapse cycle does so through a renewal movement. Not through political revolution, but through consciousness evolution. People who refuse to play the division game. People who do their inner work while the outer world burns.
The Peru Wilderness Vigil is where this work begins.
March 15-21, Sacred Valley. Seven days of removing yourself from the noise long enough to see clearly. To do the integration work that makes intimacy possible. To remember what they're trying to make you forget:
We are not each other's enemies. We are each other's medicine.
While the empire collapses around us, we're going to birth the one that comes next. Not through fighting, but through the radical act of seeing ourselves in each other.
The revolution isn't political. It's personal.
The system wants you divided. What if you stepped away from the noise long enough to remember we're all just trying to make it home?
radicaleros.com/vigil
Which one are you ready to invite in?
Ish
🍵 x 🐉
