It's The System Man

Before we go any further into the forces that shape our lives, it's worth stepping back for a moment to ask what we mean by 'system', and what these systems actually are; the ones we feel caught inside, the ones we talk about as if they are 'out there', imposed, designed, hostile, or simply broken.

Because they're not separate. They're not even particularly mysterious once you see what's driving them. What we call systems are what happens when human awareness, distorted by fear, memory, belief, and expectation, tries to make order out of chaos.

The metaphor of light and lens:

Each of us is an aperture … a small opening in the fabric of reality through which original awareness flows. You could call it soul, consciousness, spirit, or signal—it doesn't matter. The point is that the light coming through is clean at source.

Look into the eyes of a fresh baby … That-there. That's the clear unfiltered light of the world

But the light gets distorted:

But as it passes through the inner lenses we've collected … fear, shame, pride, trauma, expectation, belief … it bends. At first subtly, then more, until, eventually, if unexamined, completely.

And what's projected from that bend, the shape that appears on the wall from the contorted lens, is what we call the world. But it's not the world. It's a compounded reflection of the distortions inside us, made visible through interaction and repetition, and then mistaken for objective reality.

The Iceberg

Of course, not all of it is innocent; there is malice, there are people who know exactly what they're doing. But they are not separate from the rest of us, and they are not the root. They are the part that floats. The visible part of an iceberg."

Because what we see: the exploitation, the manipulation, the abuse of power, is only the tenth that breaches the surface. And we're so used to pointing at it as the problem that we forget to ask what it's floating on.

It's not more evil. It's not deeper malice. It's us. It's the accumulated displacement of innocent ignorance; well-meaning people who've never examined their lens, never asked where their reactions come from, never questioned the shape of the story they were born into.

The Myth of The Bad Actor

It's tempting to blame the person .. the CEO who gutted the company, the politician who broke their promise, the influencer who sold out. We see the pattern: they got power, they became corrupt, and so they must be the problem. But what if that story is backwards? What if they didn't change the system? What if the system changed them?

This is one of the hardest truths to accept: most of the dysfunction we see isn't caused by bad people; it's caused by systems that incentivise, reward, and regenerate dysfunction .. no matter who's in charge.

Why changing leaders doesn't work:

Swap the leader, replace the team, elect a reformer .. the outcome doesn't change, because the machinery is deeper than the operator. It runs on metrics that reward short-term thinking. It relies upon bureaucracies that punish initiative, politics that select for charisma over clarity, and media models that get their income through a mechanism that rewards outrage over truth.

If you put a good person into a system designed to extract, deceive, or manipulate… the system wins, not instantly, but inevitably, because most people don't bend systems; systems bend people.

The Machine Replaces The Man

There's a reason shark's teeth are arranged in rows: when one falls out, another rotates forwards. It doesn't matter which tooth was lost; the system restores the pattern. This is how our institutions behave.

When a corrupt official resigns, a new one takes their place. When a CEO steps down amid scandal, the next CEO continues the trajectory. When a cultural icon falls, another steps into their footprint .. algorithmically, ideologically, even emotionally calibrated to carry on the script.

We keep thinking we're watching stories about individuals, but we're really watching system maintenance. The news cycle tells us someone has fallen from grace, but what we're not told is how the same incentives, the same feedback loops, and the same invisible pressures remain untouched.

The Algorithm of The Animal

Before we ever built systems, we were shaped by scarcity. Our bodies, our instincts, our drives .. none of them evolved in conditions of abundance. Every survival trait we carry was forged under pressure: conserve energy, hoard resources, secure status, dominate competitors.

Laziness isn't a flaw; it's an energy conservation strategy. Greed isn't evil; it's a rational adaptation to unpredictable scarcity. Power-seeking isn't pathological; it's an evolved tribal mechanism to ensure strong leadership during existential threats.

The environmental mismatch:

These drives only become destructive when the environmental conditions change faster than our evolutionary instincts can adapt. Our reluctance to admit to, and own these and other entirely healthy, natural traits leave them unexamined, unchecked and potentially free to create havoc at the personal and collective levels.

Imagine any species that has evolved to survive famine and lethal competition between its social groupings. Its biology is calibrated to eat when food is available, to rest when movement wastes calories, to impulsively chase dominance whenever victory seems achievable.

Then, almost overnight, famine becomes feast, and tribal skirmishes are scaled to the size of nations. The instincts don't vanish; they amplify. What was once adaptive becomes runaway behaviour .. overeating, hoarding, runaway imbalances of power and wealth.

Rage Against The Machine

By now, the pattern is clear: we blame individuals, the system replaces them, and the outcomes repeat. It's easy to feel despair here, but that's only because we're still looking in the wrong place.

The reframe:

We keep asking, 'How can we fix this? We changed the government, but we're still sliding downhill.' This looks like the wrong framing. Stop separating 'them' from 'us' for a minute, because the real shift begins when we ask, 'What is it about us that keeps recreating this?'

The Multiverse Thought Experiment

Imagine reality splits into three versions; identical in every way, except for one variable in each. You don't notice, but an identical copy of this world … including you … is pasted into two other dimensions.

In the first new world, the people wake up tomorrow 50% more trusting, more gullible. People are more obedient, more emotionally driven, quicker to conform, and less likely to spot manipulation or resist the agreements of the herd.

In the second, everyone wakes up 50% less trusting of spin and rhetoric.. They become more curious, more inclined to question the narratives they're fed.

In the first, more gullible new world, people become easier to deceive, quicker to divide and control, and more easily manipulated into groups defined by othering, rage, fear, or righteousness.

In the second new world, things look very different. Leaders are held to critical and logical account. Institutions are questioned and reshaped. Narratives are tested, not swallowed.

The crucial insight:

What was the catalytic change across these three timelines? Not the laws. Not the infrastructure. Not the politicians. The only difference… was the people .. or more precisely, the lens through which they perceived reality.

The Biological Evidence

You can see this principle written into our biological cousins; almost the same genes, radically different societies. Chimpanzees and bonobos share over 98% of their DNA. They're close enough that their skeletons can be mistaken for one another. And yet, their societies … those emergent systems of dominance, belonging, and resource-sharing … could not be more different.

Chimpanzees live in a world of rigid hierarchies and violent competition. Power is won through alliance and aggression, maintained through force, and lost through betrayal.

Bonobos, on the other hand, built a different kind of system. Matriarchal, cooperative, sexually expressive, emotionally intelligent. Tension is diffused through touch, conflict is rare, alliances are formed around nurturing rather than threat."

The same biological platform; two versions of the same creature, produced two different societies. Not because of external conditions, but because of internal dispositions.

It's Your Fault … But That's Not Your fault

You didn't design this machine. Your part in it was installed into you .. through family, school, media, culture .. long before you were equipped to question it. It built itself inside you as a trusted voice, took control of your systems of trust from within you and then locked you out and changed the password.

This is not cause for self-condemnation .. it's cause for clarity. Because once you see it, you can start to unlock it. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But deliberately.

You can begin to notice your reactions, but try to think of them as the scripts you run automatically. Interrogate these reactions and reach through them to the underlying beliefs you inherited.

It Ends With Us

If I have communicated this correctly, you will see that you are not separate from the system. The stories you believe, the fears you don't examine, the instincts you trust without testing, and the roles you perform without noticing .. these are the hidden levers of every system you participate in.

Even when you think you're outside the game .. you're still inside its metaphors, still using its language, still reacting in the ways it predicts.

So long as we hold those same patterns inside us, we will keep building and upholding systems that mirror them. We can't outvote our conditioning, out-legislate our unconscious, or out-administer our addiction to certainty.

The path to change:

The more people who embody this understanding .. not perfectly, but honestly .. the more our system will change, not through revolution, but through resolution, as in a new kind of internal clarity that makes the old system obsolete.

This is how redundant or outdated systems actually collapse: not when the palace is stormed, but when the people inside stop pretending it's a palace. It becomes a house of mirrors, and the reflections no longer work, the spell breaks.

Remember: who 'They' are is defined by who we are, and 'They' won't change unless we do.

What This Chapter Reveals

Chapter 7 delivers the ultimate insight: you are not separate from the system you complain about. The system is the outer expression of our collective inner state. This isn't cause for despair, it's the location of real power.

The chapter shows that "bad actors" aren't the root cause of dysfunction—they're the inevitable outcome of systems that select for and reward certain behaviours. Changing the people without changing the selection pressures just produces new people who behave the same way.

The real leverage point is consciousness itself. When enough people stop unconsciously feeding the patterns that create dysfunctional systems, those systems lose their support structure and collapse naturally. This isn't about revolution, it's about evolution, from unconscious participation to conscious choice.

Understanding this shifts the focus from trying to fix external systems to examining and updating the internal patterns that create those systems. The system changes when we change, because we are the system.

This recognition is crucial for Chapter 8's exploration of what individual awakening actually looks like in practice, and why it's the only thing that can create lasting change.