For twenty-five years the world dodged every reckoning, each crisis smothered in money-printing and wishful thinking. But debts do not vanish; they metastasize. Now the bill has arrived, and it will be collected not in dollars but in lives, futures, and illusions. The only question worth asking is: who among us pays first?
Paris, 1999: the eve of a grand turning. We expected the Millennium to either crown us with marvels or crush us with apocalypse. The Matrix arrived like a prophecy in leather and green code. But the end didn’t come with a bang; it came with a soft, persistent hum, dissolving certainty pixel by pixel.
Smart people imagine themselves immune to deception, yet vanity is the soft underbelly every scammer aims for. My friend’s collapse into an absurd con only confirmed the deeper truth: most humans crave guidance, a few profit from the craving, and only a stubborn minority refuse the script. Sagehood isn’t granted—it’s chosen daily.
Numbers have become the new gospel. They no longer reveal truth but sanctify deception. Cooked data, cherry-picked consensus, and anonymous peer review now serve where priests once stood. We built an altar of spreadsheets and called it science. And still, beneath the glow of our charts, the truth quietly waits for its debt to be paid.
We laugh at Andersen’s emperor, yet the same farce plays out on a planetary scale. Systems set impossible goals, individuals pretend to meet them, and everyone nods along to preserve the illusion. China’s numbers, Western markets, Soviet tragedies—it’s always the same play. Nobody moves first. And history never punishes the liars—only the believers.
Every empire is built on a beautiful lie. Ponzi had his postage stamps; Aramco has its oil fields. The con changes shape, not substance. We call it business, progress, valuation — anything but belief. But the moment the music stops, all that’s left is silence and the faint smell of burned confidence.