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.
Free trade, we’re told, is the gentle glue holding civilization together. In practice, it’s a velvet handshake masking an iron hook. One side externalizes misery; the other externalizes guilt. COVID didn’t break the arrangement — it merely tore off the decorative ribbon and showed the machinery of parasitism humming underneath.
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.
Reinhold Messner saw a creature in the Himalayan dusk and paid for it with decades of ridicule. Today, whole institutions are selling Yetis of their own—models they won’t open, predictions they won’t defend, and fears they won’t verify. The difference? Messner harmed only his reputation. Our modern oracles threaten the foundations we live on.
Dreams are not stolen from those who never had to fight for survival. They are stolen from children whose only ambition is to eat tomorrow, to live through the week, to see their parents come home alive. Every policy that slows development and makes energy scarce steals from them directly. Reality keeps the receipts.
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.