The Oldest Algorithm

It’s easier to control someone who’s lost everything. I know that because I’ve lived it. When I was broke, couch-surfing, and dependent on both pills and a belief system that promised salvation, I learned the oldest formula of power: create dependency, then sell deliverance. Whether the currency is faith, pharmaceuticals, or fiat money, the pattern is identical. Strip people of options and obedience begins to look like relief. What I once experienced in miniature, I now watch play out on the world stage.

The Pattern

Collapse doesn’t begin when buildings burn or banks fail. It begins when people trade agency for certainty. That trade is almost always voluntary at first—just until things stabilize. But stabilization rarely comes; management does.

History keeps the receipts.

• Ancient Egypt: famine centralized food. Peasants “sold” land and freedom for grain. Out of hunger was born the first welfare-as-control model.
• Rome: bread and circuses—keep the stomach and the spectacle full, and citizens will forgive the corruption.
• Medieval Europe: salvation for sale. The Church monopolized literacy and forgiveness. Pay your tithe; outsource your conscience.
• Industrial England: poverty moralized, then monetized. Debtors’ prisons turned survival into an industry.
• 20th-century regimes: Hitler, Stalin, Mao—all mastered instability as devotion. Destroy livelihoods, then ration hope.

Every empire rediscovers the same algorithm: destabilize → rescue → regulate → repeat.

The Modern Upgrade

We’ve digitized the ritual. Today the rescue arrives by app instead of decree. Inflation erodes wages. Debt replaces income. Convenience replaces competence. Then, when the financial storm hits, new systems appear to “protect” us—central-bank digital currencies, programmable welfare, algorithmic rationing of visibility and credit. It’s sold as progress. It’s actually containment.

If you can’t grow food, defend privacy, or survive three days without Wi-Fi, you’re already domesticated. The leash just hasn’t tightened yet.

This isn’t villainy—it’s psychology. Power migrates to wherever fear congregates. When enough people feel unsafe, they’ll accept surveillance as safety and control as compassion. It’s the same nervous-system hijack that once kept me loyal to both my prescription bottles and my preacher.

The Biology of Obedience

Control doesn’t sustain itself through logic; it sustains itself through physiology.

When resources or belonging feel threatened, the limbic system floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline. Blood rushes from the prefrontal cortex—the seat of reason—to the survival centers of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Long-term thinking shuts down. The question shifts from why to where’s safety?

Every manipulative system exploits that reflex:

• Religion creates existential threat (“Without us, eternal punishment”).
• Marketing creates social threat (“Without this, you’ll be left behind”).
• Politics creates physical threat (“Without us, chaos”).
• Medicine creates biological threat (“Without this, you’ll die”).

Different costumes, same cortisol.

B. F. Skinner called it intermittent reinforcement—the most addictive schedule of reward. Keep relief unpredictable and people stay hooked. The slot machine, the news cycle, the infinite scroll—they all run on the same pulse: deprivation, reward, repeat. It’s not conspiracy; it’s conditioning.

Why Collapse Pays

Collapse is always someone’s business model. When economies wobble, elites consolidate assets. When health crises hit, pharma consolidates patents. When war looms, defense consolidates contracts. When privacy erodes, tech consolidates surveillance.

What looks like chaos from below is often integration from above. No secret handshakes required—just shared incentives. Systems protect themselves like organisms do.

The Social Nervous System

Polyvagal theory names what cult psychology already knew: bodies read safety through connection. A stable community relaxes the vagus nerve; isolation keeps it hyper-vigilant.

Now picture a population flooded with anxiety, medicated for coping, scrolling for meaning, and financially insecure. That’s not a glitch; that’s perfect conditioning.

A dysregulated populace seeks external regulation. Authority becomes the substitute for attunement. In cult language, that’s dependency maintenance. In policy language, compliance. In biology, it’s the same: the organism shrinks its range of motion to feel safe.

The American Moment

The U.S. once exported confidence as currency. Now it exports debt. The dollar’s dominance—built on global faith in American stability—is wobbling. De dollarization isn’t collapse yet, but it signals a migration of trust.

Domestically, citizens feel it somatically. Prices rise. Savings shrink. Anxiety spikes. It’s not just purchasing power that’s eroding—it’s psychological margin.

The more people live one missed paycheck from ruin, the easier it becomes to manage behavior through incentives and threats. Control scales not through ideology but through indebtedness.

The Psychological Exit Strategy

Panic is the trap. Preparation is the protest. Regulate before you rebel. Nervous-system regulation—breath, sunlight, sleep, presence—isn’t “self-care.” It’s cognitive armor. A calm mind resists manipulation. Localize what you can: food, skill, trade, trust. Decentralization is trauma-informed economics. Depend less, discern more. Guard your attention. Every platform competes for your limbic system. Attention is the real currency; hoard it wisely. And remember: when you know the pattern, you stop mistaking repetition for progress.

The Inner Economy

When I finally detoxed—from the pills and the ideology—I realized something radical: sovereignty begins in biology. A person who can self-soothe, self-source, and self-educate cannot be ruled for long.

The same applies to civilizations. A society that can meet its own needs without perpetual debt is hard to manipulate. That’s why every empire in decline targets the same three organs of autonomy: food, energy, and narrative. Control those, and you don’t need armies.

We’re living another iteration of that contest. Whether it becomes renewal or regression depends on how many of us can regulate before we react.

Reclaiming the Myth

Collapse, mythically speaking, isn’t destruction—it’s disillusionment. Every empire must watch its false gods fail. Every human must too. The question isn’t will it happen but who will we become when it does. If collapse is treated as purification, not punishment, the pattern breaks. The antidote to control isn’t counter-control—it’s consciousness. Awareness spreads faster than fear once people remember that authority depends on their participation.

Closing the Circuit

Control feeds on despair; sovereignty feeds on meaning. Reclaim meaning, and you starve the machine. I know this not from reading history but from surviving it. Collapse stripped me bare—but it also rewired me. It taught me that freedom doesn’t begin when you escape the system; it begins when the system can no longer rent space in your nervous system. The economy may fluctuate. The dollar may devalue. But presence—steady breath, clear mind, grounded purpose—remains the only non-inflationary asset on Earth.

If you hold that, you cannot be owned.