The Election Didn’t Matter.
A realization: We Didn’t Vote Our Way Into This. We Won’t Vote Our Way Out.
This isn’t a partisan piece. It’s not an argument for Trump or Harris. It’s a structural diagnosis. One I resisted—until the clues made it unavoidable. I promised to write things that mattered. Well, here’s one that matters. You're not wrong if you’ve felt like something deeper is broken. This is the map as to why you felt what you feel.
Let’s start with a statement that feels like heresy in most American circles:
The 2024 election didn’t matter.
Not because Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were the same.
They weren’t.
Not morally. Not politically. Not in how they would wield power or be perceived abroad. How could the past hundred days not have felt different under Trump’s brand of chaos and suffering management?
It didn’t matter because the system that gave those differences weight has already failed.
We weren’t choosing between two competing futures.
We were voting on which narrator would read us the script of a system that no longer works.
That may sound cynical. It’s not. It’s structural.
I didn’t arrive at this conclusion overnight. Like many of you, I believed that policy and politics mattered. I worked in that system. I donated to campaigns. I even helped shape them on the margins.
But I’ve reached a different conclusion.
None of it matters now. The system is a dead man walking.
There was a time when electoral outcomes shaped policy, governance, and the global order. That time is over.
What we’re witnessing—what you likely feel, whether you can name it or not—is the collapse of coherence.
You cast a vote. The machine blinked. The winner was announced.
But nothing truly shifted—not in a meaningful, strategic, or institutional sense.
Why?
Because we are no longer governed by a stable set of rules, actors, or institutions.
We are governed by noise.
The system didn’t collapse.
It decohered.
And when that happens, elections stop functioning as decision points.
They become rituals—performed for the sake of continuity, not legitimacy.
You’re still being offered a choice. But it’s a false one. A binary in a broken machine.
This election was never going to restore the rule of law.
It wasn’t going to fix the courts, re-legitimize Congress, or bring functional governance back online.
At best, it might’ve slowed the chaos.
At worst, it would accelerate it.
We got the worst outcome.
We got Trump. We rolled craps.
Accelerationism. Nihilism. A full-speed explosion of the rule of law.
The car’s already off the cliff. He just cut the brake lines and floored it.
So yes, many people blame him. But it’s not him—not entirely.
He’s the maniac behind the wheel, sure.
But the road was already washed out.
The chaos was baked in.
And it’s not just the United States, either.
We may feel it more acutely because we were raised on the myth of American exceptionalism—rule of law, rights, restraint, and apple pie. But this collapse of coherence is happening everywhere. It’s not uniform. But it’s systemic.
We are standing at the edge of a global inflection point.
Americans may feel it first, and our allies next, because we were the primary stakeholders in the postwar liberal order. The system that emerged after 1945—and before that, the Westphalian structure of sovereign states—is unraveling.
But not in the way Susan Strange or classical IR theory predicted.1
States still exist. Passports still exist. Legislatures still exist.
Your Congressman is still doing press hits. Your Parliamentarian is still filing bills.
But none of it makes sense anymore.
Now, I know some of you will say, “Well, it never made sense.”
That’s bullshit.
You may have thought that—but you’d be wrong. There was an internal logic.
States operated within legible rules. International relations followed a rough hierarchy. There were norms, deterrents, and consequences. It wasn’t perfect—but it worked well enough to persist.
That logic is what’s collapsing.
Into what?
Originally, I called it Grey Zone Politics (not the best terminology, I know, but it was the best I could do then). But that didn’t go far enough.
After more analysis, soaking and poking, and hard-won clarity, I’ve arrived at a better term. One that aligns more precisely with international relations theory—and with what we’re living through:
Stochastic Anarchy.
Let’s begin.
In this piece:
Why the 2024 election did not matter
What has replaced the rules-based world we grew up in
A global map of institutional decoherence
What it means for you now
What it means for the future
What We’re Living Through
Before we talk about what’s replaced the system, we need to talk about what the system was. This isn’t just political dysfunction. It's a breakdown in the modern world's operating code.
Let’s go back to basics. I realize many of you are not political scientists, and you might not have thought about the world as a “system.” However, understanding how it all was “supposed to work” is essential before discussing how “it’s broken.”
The Westphalian Operating System
The world we lived in—until recently—was structured by a political logic born in 1648, at the end of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. Now, I’m guessing you couldn't care less about that war. Fair enough. What you do need to know is that the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended that war, formalized a new concept:
If you control a defined territory, and other sovereigns recognize your authority, you are a legitimate actor in international affairs. We call that actor “sovereign,” and we call the territory “the state.”
That became the basis for what we now call the nation-state system.
It was built on a few simple, durable premises:
Sovereignty is tied to territory.
States are the primary actors in global affairs.
Each state has the right to govern its internal affairs without external interference.
International order emerges from recognition, balance, and diplomacy—not central authority.
So, your passport. Taxation. Laws. The Constitution. What side of the road do you drive on? Tort law. Flag Day. The Geneva Convention. The UN. The Law of the Sea. Signalling “S.O.S.” All comes from that treaty in some form or fashion. That logic held for centuries. It birthed the borders you see on every map since 1648. It has been the basis for every monarch, every President, and every dictator’s claim of sovereignty.
Then came 1945.
After World War II, a new layer was added—what many called the rules-based international order. This version of Westphalia came with institutions: the United Nations, the World Bank, NATO, and the IMF. It fused sovereignty with liberal norms: democracy, human rights, free trade, and collective security. Soon after, we had all kinds of organizations all over the place.
The Cold War distorted that order, but it didn’t destroy it.
By the 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union, this system reached its peak. The U.S. was the hegemon. Globalization was the project. Democracy was the brand. And history, we were told, had ended.2
That was the promise: rational states, embedded in multilateral institutions, pursuing shared goals under international law.
What Held It All Together
The old system wasn’t perfect, but it was coherent. It functioned.
If a state passed a law, that law applied.
If you voted, the result was accepted.
If the IMF issued terms, they carried weight.
If a treaty was signed, it meant something. In fact, the international system had a norm that nearly all states followed: pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be kept).
There were rules. There were processes. There was enough consensus to make the system function.
That’s the world many of us were raised to believe still exists.
But it doesn’t.
Or rather—it exists in form, not function.
The Failure of Coherence
The world still looks like a system of nation-states, but under the hood, it’s glitching. The assumptions that held it together—about rational actors, enforceable rules, and coordinated outcomes—are breaking down.
The state still exists. But its capacity is hollowed out.
Laws still exist. But enforcement is arbitrary, delayed, or nonexistent.
Institutions still exist. But trust, legitimacy, and effectiveness have evaporated.
This isn’t the return of the jungle. It’s the failure of the map.
We’re in motion—but no longer in control.
This isn’t classical anarchy, where no higher authority exists and states navigate through balancing and deterrence.
This is something else.
Introducing: Stochastic Anarchy
Let me offer a better term for what we’re now living through:
Stochastic Anarchy.
Stochastic, because outcomes are now governed by what feels like randomness, shock, and probabilistic influence—not deliberate policy.
Anarchy, because there’s no longer a coherent sovereign authority at any level. Just fragments of control, flickering in and out of relevance.
Let me make this concrete.
We now live in a system where:
A U.S. president can ignore a Supreme Court ruling, say he’s complying, and the system shrugs.
A tech billionaire can unilaterally reshape space policy, financial markets, and speech law.
The EU can claim a defense policy—while relying entirely on NATO and outsourcing deterrence to the United States.
Multinational corporations can override national regulations more effectively than most foreign governments.
This is not chaos.
This is something worse.
It’s a system that still performs the rituals of governance—elections, treaties, laws—but no longer produces results.
It’s signal without coordination.
Authority without follow-through.
Motion without meaning.
Outcomes still occur. But they no longer emerge from rules, norms, or strategy.
They emerge from noise, reaction, and memetic acceleration.
You may vote. You may appeal. You may sue.
But the result? That depends on a stochastic blend of:
legal ambiguity,
social media pressure,
algorithmic timing,
institutional inertia,
and who happens to be in the room.
This is Schrödinger’s Politics:
The law both applies and doesn’t. Which outcome will you see? Depends on who can force the observance.
The institution both exists and fails. Again—same question, same answer.
Your rights are both guaranteed and irrelevant—until observed. And whether they’re observed at all depends on conditions that feel almost… probabilistic.
This is why elections no longer matter in the way you think they do.
Because we are no longer in a rules-based system.
We are in a narrative-based system—which sometimes wears the skin of quantification.
We are in a signal-based system.
And the signal is glitching.
For now, I call it stochastic anarchy. There’s little structure. Much of the underlying function is undefined ex ante (before it happens)—but feels almost preordained ex post (after it happens).
That’s the essence of Schrödinger’s Politics:
The law exists—until it doesn’t.
Rights exist—until they’re tested.
The system governs—until you need it to.
This is not how the Westphalian system worked—at the structural level, whether you’re looking at the macro (world affairs) or institutional (inside the state) layer.
Not to veer too far into international relations dogma, but regardless of your theoretical bent—realism, liberalism, constructivism—you’d be hard-pressed to fit any of what’s happening now into a clean model.
I’ve tried.
Power relations don’t answer the mail. (Realism—both offensive and defensive—fails.)
Institutions are completely off the rails. (Liberalism fails.)
Normative construction lacks consensus, predictability, and in many cases, logical meaning. (Constructivism fails.)
All that’s left is the individual—the only actor still trying to make sense of a system where:
Structures may exist (like states),
But those states may or may not function.
Laws may or may not be enforced.
Norms may or may not perform as expected.
Stochastic. Quantum in behavior at times.3 (Because observation itself alters the outcome.)
And no one seems to be obviously in charge—not consistently.
Anarchic.
If someone has a better theory, I’m all ears.4
But for now?
I think I beat the rest of you to the punch.
In your face, Kenneth.5
Trump Is the Opportunistic Infection
Let’s be clear: Trump is not the system’s collapse.
He’s what happens when the immune system’s already gone.
If you’ve been reading this and thinking, “Okay, but come on—it has to matter that Donald Trump is back in the White House,” you’re not wrong.
It does matter.
Just not in the way you think.
Trump didn’t create the conditions of decay.
He is the accelerant—not the architect.
The opportunistic infection—not the virus.
He’s the fever, not the disease.
The disease is institutional decoherence. The loss of state capacity. The hollowing out of democratic legitimacy. The mutation of laws into performance. The shift from rule to ritual.
That’s been building for decades. One might argue since 1960, but for me, I can definitely trace from 1980 to now. I’ve written about it multiple times here at TLM, but for those who need a refresher, here’s the quick map:
1980s–90s: Market Uber Alles
Deregulation, globalization, and privatization have become bipartisan gospel. Neoliberalism hollows out the public sector. The state retreats, voluntarily, from economic stewardship and infrastructure ownership.
→ Structural capacity begins to decay.1990s–2000s: Capture and Complexity
Policy becomes so complex that lobbyists effectively write it. Financial institutions self-regulate into crisis. Tech and capital start outpacing law.
→ Governance shifts from institutions to markets.Post-9/11: Security State Expansion
Massive growth of the national security apparatus under opaque executive authority. The War on Terror rewires legal norms, increases secrecy, and trains institutions to treat oversight as optional.
→ The rule of law becomes situational.2008–09: The Bailout and the Bluff
The global financial crisis exposed that the state can no longer regulate or contain capital—only absorb its failures. Wall Street gets bailed out, and Main Street gets austerity.
→ Legitimacy hemorrhages.2010s: The Platform Takeover
Algorithms begin to mediate truth. Facebook shapes elections: Google, Amazon, and Apple scale beyond sovereign reach. States become lagging indicators, not rule-setters.
→ Narrative control slips from public hands.2016–2020: Trump as Beta Test
The first Trump administration broke norms, but revealed they were only norms. Checks and balances failed. Congress claimed oversight but could not enforce it.
→ Stress test fails. System reveals hollowness.2020–2024: Pandemic and Permissionless Collapse
COVID-19 exposed total institutional brittleness: Health agencies, courts, legislatures, and even local governments couldn’t act cohesively, and public trust imploded.
→ Fragmentation accelerates.2024–present: Phase Shift
The second Trump administration doesn’t break the system. It inherits a broken one—and simply refuses to pretend anymore.
→ The rituals continue. The functions are gone.
Trump is what happens when a system loses its guardrails and someone decides to completely cast off any self-restraint, go for broke, and indulge every whim, every desire, every fantasy, and every evil act of gluttony one can imagine.
And guess what?
There’s no guardrail.
77 million people voted for this because the price of eggs was too high. You have every right to be angry with them. But their stupidity and Trump’s gluttony are but additional symptoms of a global system in full decoherence. As Grant famously predicted: “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
Perhaps he will be proven correct. Who knows. That said, those of you pining for what might have been, I don’t think we would have avoided the outcome, just delayed the inevitable.
The Alternative Timeline
If Kamala Harris had won, things would look different—but only superficially.
Yes, Harris probably wouldn’t accept a plane with gold accents, nudes on velvet, and a completely pimped-out lounge. Yes, we probably wouldn’t have had a trade war that single-handedly erased 10 trillion dollars in wealth, crashed the bond market, and sparked worldwide de-dollarization, ending US hegemony in trade. Yes, we wouldn’t have the Oval Office look like the high-roller suite at Caesar’s, a two-year-old blond press secretary lying weekly, wearing a cross bigger than the one Christ was crucified on, and a guy whose head looks like a penis spouting off every day about getting rid of Habeas Corpus.
I know—from your perspective, that sounds like utopia. I get it.
I agree that you’d get slower erosion versus the mainlining of crack performance we’re getting with Trump—a more competent continuity performance.
A softer landing—maybe.
But the systemic forces wouldn’t change:
The courts would still be politicized.
Congress would still be a circus.
Regulation would still be captured.
Trust would still be collapsing.
The border, the banks, the bureaucracy? Still broken.
Trump makes all of this more challenging to ignore and accelerates the collapse. If you read Bruce Hoffman’s book “God, Guns, and Sedition,” this is in part the entire Republican project—blow up the world in favor of creating a new one. Collapse everything as fast as possible to create “utopia.” Even Trump’s critics would probably admit: things broke fast.
His return doesn’t change the diagnosis—it just removes the anesthetic.
Why the U.S. Feels It First
We feel it acutely in America because we were taught the system worked, that institutions were legitimate, that checks and balances existed, and that law had meaning.
When those illusions collapse, it doesn’t feel like drift—it feels like betrayal.
But the collapse isn’t unique to us. It’s happening globally.
The UK is a parody of its former self.
France is in permanent revolt.
India is automating its authoritarianism.
The EU is stuck in strategic superposition: assertive, impotent, and dependent, all at once.
We happen to have the worst possible narrator for the global unraveling.
Trump isn’t proof that the system can’t be saved. I mean seriously, we have a man who has a spray painted face who is literally on TV constantly saying the most ridiculous shit ever engaged in a non-stop crime spree or a civil rights trainwreck.
You could only ignore it if you blotted your eyes out and drove an icepick into your ears.
He’s proof that it’s already gone—and that the people inside it will keep driving even as the wheels come off.
The Global Echoes of Decoherence
If you’ve made it this far, you might be wondering: Okay—but is this just an American problem?
No. Not even close.
What we’re experiencing in the U.S. is the loudest example of a broader phenomenon: The collapse of institutional coherence across the postwar global order.
It’s not happening everywhere at the same rate.
But it’s happening system-wide—like pressure building across tectonic plates.
Here’s what it looks like (selected case studies if you will, I’m not a comparativist):
The UK: Bureaucratic Farce as Political Theater
Britain left the EU, then spent years pretending that meant something.
The promise was simple: Take back control.
Sovereignty, borders, trade, identity—Britain would “stand alone” again.
What it got instead was the world’s most expensive act of national self-harm.
Since Brexit:
The UK has lost access to one of the largest single markets on Earth.
Trade barriers now choke small businesses that once operated frictionlessly
Scotland is actively reconsidering independence.
Northern Ireland is in a legal gray zone still being “workshopped.”
The City of London is losing ground to Paris, Frankfurt, and New York.
Food prices spiked. Supply chains broke. Investment plummeted.
And the famed “Brexit dividend”? It was a statistical hallucination.
Instead of reclaiming sovereignty, Britain outsourced complexity to chaos:
It rewrote thousands of pages of EU-derived law without a plan.
It replaced functional bureaucratic integration with opaque ministerial discretion.
It made “taking back control” mean little more than replacing European technocrats with unaccountable domestic ones.
What it didn’t get was agency.
What it didn’t get was clarity.
What it didn’t get was functioning governance.
The Tories imploded into infighting, culture war sloganeering, and performative governance. Labour, terrified of looking “elitist,” refused to name what was plainly true: Brexit broke the machine.
As a result:
Policy is now made for headlines.
Regulation is incoherent.
Strategic direction is nonexistent.
Public services are collapsing.
And the British state now exists mostly to manage its own decline.
This is what Stochastic Anarchy looks like in post-imperial form: A country that still performs sovereignty but can no longer operate it.
It waves flags.
It stages coronations.
It talks tough on immigration and carbon targets.
But it can’t deliver mail.
It can’t build trains.
It can’t keep rivers clean.
It can’t feed children in public schools.
The form of sovereignty remains.
The function is gone.
Heck, Labour today is busy passing “hardcore” immigration policies? Really? Does that sound like a Labour policy to you? Does that sound like a country that can manage itself effectively? Does it sound like a country that’s growing?
France: Permanent Revolt, No Resolution
France has entered a cycle of structural unrest:
protest → repression → performative reform → backlash → repeat.
It’s not just episodic. It’s rhythmic. Ritualized.
A kind of national cardiovascular event.
Every few months, the system convulses—but nothing really changes.
At the center of it all is Emmanuel Macron: A president who governs like a technocrat in a pressure cooker—calm on the surface, boiling underneath, and completely sealed shut.
His agenda is pure post-political managerialism:
Raise the retirement age? Do it by executive decree.
Reform labor laws? Ignore unions, call it “modernization.”
Address police violence? Deny systemic racism, increase surveillance powers.
The result? Perpetual revolt.
The Yellow Vests. The pension strikes. The climate marches. The protests over police brutality.
Each one is a symptom—not of ideological grievance, but of institutional illegibility.
Because in France, the state still has the power to act—but it no longer has the consent to govern.
That’s the paradox.
It can impose—but it cannot persuade.
It still wields force.
But legitimacy? That's eroded.
The institutions still function—but the public no longer believes they serve the republic.
And so the protests come—loud, creative, disruptive, full of historical resonance.
But there is no resolution. Because there is no listening.
Only performance.
The state performs authority.
The public performs rebellion.
The press performs analysis.
The system endures, but it no longer evolves.
Macron once promised a “new politics.” What France got instead was refined inertia.
A nation that revolts not to change the system, but to signal that it’s still alive inside it.
This is Stochastic Anarchy in the French register:
Legitimacy by spectacle. Governance by attrition.
There’s no collapse. Just a slow, looping feedback loop—exhaustion masquerading as order.
The fire burns. The engine doesn’t turn.
India: Algorithmic Authoritarianism
India isn’t sliding into classical authoritarianism.
It’s upgrading into something far more ambient.
Under Narendra Modi, India is building the world’s largest experiment in digitized control wrapped in democratic theater.
It still holds elections.
It still has opposition parties.
It still prints newspapers and broadcasts parliamentary debates.
But beneath that democratic skin is a new kind of governance—one that fuses:
Surveillance infrastructure,
Platform censorship,
Nationalist ideology, and
Judicial pliability
into a seamless machine of control.
You’re not arrested for dissent.
You’re erased for it.
Accounts vanish.
Bank access freezes.
Your name disappears from voter rolls.
Your location data becomes state property.
This isn’t classic tyranny.
It’s precision-engineered friction.
Just enough pressure to remind you who’s in charge.
Not enough to draw international scrutiny.
Modi doesn’t rule by fear.
He rules by signal control.
By managing the interface between the citizen and the state through abstraction, friction, and narrative saturation.
The result?
Democracy in form. Dystopia in function.
Elections are held.
Laws are passed.
Speeches are made.
And somewhere between the biometric scan and the app notification, the citizen disappears—not physically, but politically, economically, and socially.
India is no longer practicing liberal democracy.
It’s practicing compliance-by-design.
That’s Stochastic Anarchy in its most advanced form:
The law exists—but is selectively deployed.
Institutions exist—but are subsumed into a nationalist operating system.
Rights exist—but only until they trigger a keyword flag.
It’s not mass arrests.
It’s mass permissioning.
And the permission can vanish—without anyone even knocking on your door.
No boot. No knock. Just silence.
Hungary: Orbán’s Competitive Authoritarianism
Viktor Orbán didn’t destroy Hungarian democracy. He rewrote its rules until democracy performed his agenda.
Hungary still has elections.
Opposition parties still exist.
Courts still issue rulings.
But:
The media is state-aligned or oligarch-owned.
The judiciary is packed.
Electoral maps are gerrymandered.
Civil society is surveilled.
EU funds are weaponized and diverted.
This is not overt dictatorship. This is legal subversion of pluralism—drip-fed over a decade until the system only allows one winner.
And Europe, despite its declarations, funds it.
Orbán vetoes EU foreign policy.
He cozies up to Putin.
He rewrites Holocaust history.
And Brussels keeps cutting checks.
This is not collapse.
It’s narrative capture in slow motion.
Orbán didn’t kill the system.
He branded it.
And made liberal democracy obey.
In Hungary, the state still speaks democracy—but only one voice comes out.
Brazil: Bolsonaro’s Memetic Counter-State
Jair Bolsonaro didn’t need to overthrow the Brazilian state. He delegitimized it from within.
As president, he treated institutions as both obstacle and scapegoat:
He attacked the Supreme Court.
Spread disinformation about elections.
Militarized the Amazon and turned environmental destruction into a nationalist cause.
Flirted with coup rhetoric while insisting he was the victim of one.
Bolsonaro governed like a man constantly auditioning for rebellion—never quite staging one, but always laying the memetic groundwork.
Even after losing, the structure he enabled remains:
Police forces with dual loyalties.
Judges under threat.
Militias politicized.
The public unsure if the law is real, or just waiting to be defied.
Bolsonaro didn’t dismantle the state. He infected it with permanent epistemic crisis.
Brazil is still a democracy.
But it’s a democracy that no longer trusts its votes, its courts, or its ability to survive another president like him.
Democracy in form. Gaslighting in function. He’s the Trump of Brazil, minus the hats and the orange spray tan.
The EU: Strategic Superposition
The European Union speaks with strength—on paper.
It has a European Defence Fund, a Digital Markets Act, a Green Deal, and more high-minded “strategic roadmaps” than any human could read in a lifetime.
It talks about:
Strategic autonomy from the United States.
Digital sovereignty from Silicon Valley.
Environmental sovereignty from fossil fuel states.
Moral sovereignty in human rights, the rule of law, and democracy.
But when pressure hits?
The EU waits.
Waits for NATO to respond to security threats.
Waits for Germany and France to find consensus.
Waits for Hungary to stop vetoing everything.
Waits for Washington to set the tone—then responds with a communique.
It exists in a quantum state of policy ambition and geopolitical caution.
A Schrödinger's superstate.
It has a flag, an anthem, a parliament, a court, a central bank, and a diplomatic corps.
And yet—
It has no army (they appropriated a trillion dollars for weapons and army, where is it? What progress has been made?)
No common foreign policy doctrine.
No unified border enforcement.
No executive capable of crisis command.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the EU issued statements.
It pledged solidarity.
It promised resilience.
But hard power still came from NATO.
Logistics still flowed through the U.S.
Air defense still depended on American command.
This is not a failure of intent.
It’s a failure of coherence.
The EU governs through layers:
Layered consensus.
Layered jurisdiction.
Layered compliance.
But in a crisis, layers become latency.
It can regulate cookie banners with surgical precision.
But it cannot stop a Hungarian autocrat from paralyzing the foreign affairs agenda.
It cannot guarantee that a sanctions regime will be uniformly enforced.
It cannot mobilize troops, command fleets, or project force without borrowing someone else's chain of command.
It both acts and doesn’t.
It both governs and waits.
It’s a sovereign cloud—a collective will smeared across 27 veto points.
This is Stochastic Anarchy in procedural drag:
An institutional thicket where everything is said, but nothing is final.
A place where policy is made by position papers and power is distributed across opacity.
A machine built to never go to war again—and thus, incapable of acting like it might need to.
The EU has power, yes.
Regulatory power.
Market power.
Cultural power.
But it lacks autonomy.
And it lacks capacity cohesion.
When the pressure’s off, it governs.
When the pressure’s on, it fragments.
That’s not collapse—it’s superposition.
The EU exists in potential. But not in force.
Yes, it’s able to cohere and make decisions from time to time, but those are far and few between. As a transnational actor, it’s incredibly weak for what it claims to be able to do.
The Pattern: Form Without Function
This is what Stochastic Anarchy looks like at scale:
Laws exist—but they’re not consistently applied.
Leaders exist—but they don’t command real authority.
Institutions exist—but they’re unable to coordinate outcomes.
States exist—but can no longer guarantee meaning, protection, or stability.
The world still has borders, treaties, summits, and speeches.
But the outcomes are no longer emerging from coherent deliberation.
They’re shaped by:
Market reaction,
Algorithmic virality,
Billionaire whims,
Cultural fragmentation,
And probabilistic disruption.
In short: the entire global order is drifting into Schrödinger’s Governance.
Things both are and are not, until observed.
Legitimacy both exists and doesn’t, until enforced.
Why It Hits the U.S. Hardest
Americans might think they feel this most acutely for one reason: we believed in the system. (The second might be we’re self centered dicks most of the time.)
We were the high priests of the rules-based order. We taught our kids about checks and balances. We invaded countries in the name of democratic legitimacy.
So when our system stops working—when the rituals persist but the results don’t—it doesn’t just feel like dysfunction.
It feels like a spiritual betrayal.
But this isn’t just about America breaking.
It’s about the entire global scaffolding loosening at once.
And in that loosened world, Trump isn’t an outlier.
He’s just the loudest example of a deeper reality:
We are no longer governed by states.
We are governed by signals.
And the signals are breaking down.
When Systems Fail, Sovereignty Reverts to the Individual
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations.
You already understand more about the world than most of the people governing it.
So now comes the hard part.
What do you do when the system doesn’t work?
Because that’s where we are now—not just in the United States, but across the global order.
The rituals remain. The outcomes don’t. The signals are glitching. The coherence is gone.
And when coherence fails, one thing happens:
Sovereignty collapses inward.
It’s no longer conferred by passport.
It’s no longer enforced by law.
It’s no longer protected by constitution.
It’s yours. Or it’s nothing.
This is the terrifying—and liberating—truth of Stochastic Anarchy:
Agency is self-issued.
Not granted.
Not inherited.
Not assigned.
Claimed.
Here’s What That Actually Means
No one’s coming to save you.
No one’s coordinating rescue.
There is no stable system to rely on, no institution to anchor to, no timeline where “normal” comes back.
That sounds bleak. But it’s not. It’s clarifying.
Because once you stop waiting for coherence to return, you can stop delaying action. You can start building your own resilience—mentally, financially, operationally, and existentially.
And you can start doing it now.
You don’t need permission.
What Happens Next Is Up to You
The good news is: there are ways to build sovereignty. There are blueprints. Playbooks. Protocols. That’s what I write about—here in The Long Memo, and in more depth over at Borderless Living.
But let me be clear:
The starting point isn’t a second passport.
It’s not a bank account in Zurich.
It’s not even a VPN or a dual-residency strategy.
It’s this:
Stop pretending the system works just because the symbols still exist.
Stop waiting for elections to solve a structural crisis.
Stop assuming institutions will protect you when the time comes.
Stop thinking the courts are going to hold the line.
Stop believing laws apply evenly, or that rights exist independently of enforcement.
Those were 20th-century assumptions.
They do not hold here.
You are now living in the next system. One that hasn’t been named—until now.
If you believe, as I do, that we’re in the middle of something massive, a global system-change event, then we’re witnessing something that isn’t going to end in our lifetimes.
It won’t end in our children’s lifetimes either.
The city-state model took nearly 200 years to dissolve into the Westphalian state system. Constantinople fell in 1453. That was the last city-state with real imperial gravity. The Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648. That’s 195 years of grey-zone rule: Papal states, quasi-empires, tribal networks, mercenary enclaves, and kingdoms in constant flux.
So no—I don’t think the nation-state is going away.
The United States isn’t going to vanish.
The flag will still fly.
France will still be France.
Passports will still be stamped.
Laws will still be passed.
Money will still move.
But here’s the part most people haven’t come to terms with:
None of it will function the way it used to.
Not fully. Not predictably. Not reliably.
And that’s what will make it maddening.
Somalia is the cautionary tale here.
It’s been a failed state for decades. No centralized government. No real military. No functional civil apparatus.
And yet—no one has invaded it.
No one’s rushing in to “fix” it.
It hasn’t even been conquered by one of its own warlords and turned into a new flag-waving kingdom. Not really. Not fully. Not sustainably.
By classical IR logic, that’s not supposed to happen.
But it’s happening anyway.
The crude answer is: no one wants Somalia.
The real answer is more interesting: even failed states persist.
They don’t have to work. They just have to exist.
We see this elsewhere, too. Canada isn’t defending its border even as Trump floats invasion rhetoric. No tanks. No press conferences. Just quiet drift.
Because the system isn’t collapsing.
It’s stalling in place.
That’s the real danger.
Not that it ends—but that it stays. That it lingers. That it functions just enough to maintain the illusion while slowly disconnecting from meaning.
The flags will wave.
The courthouses will open.
The money will flow.
The elections will happen.
But:
Work will no longer build wealth.
Obedience will no longer guarantee rights.
Voting will no longer deliver stability.
Nationalism will no longer produce safety.
Everything will look intact.
But none of it will work.
And that’s where things get weird. Hunter S. Thompson weird.
Because once you layer in climate disruption—and we haven’t even scratched that in this piece—you get real entropy. Border fragility. Food scarcity. Water wars. States stressed to the edge of internal failure.
And still—the structures will remain.
What changes is that the painting of reality stops making sense.
Before 1980, the world was painted by the Dutch Masters.
It was realism. It was coherent. It was lifelike.
After 2000, it turned into Picasso. Cubism. Abstract. But still vaguely recognizable.
Now?
Now Picasso’s doing a painting a year on ten ounces of meth a day.
The paintings are still meant to depict reality.
But good luck figuring out what you’re looking at.
That’s the world we’re moving into.
The systems are still here.
They just no longer speak the truth.
And that’s why sovereignty isn’t a legal status anymore.
It’s not a policy outcome.
It’s not a passport.
It’s a practice. A mindset. A refusal to outsource your sanity to institutions that can no longer guarantee coherence.
Welcome to Stochastic Anarchy.
You can’t fix it.
You can’t vote it away.
You can’t hide from it.
But you can learn to move inside it—with clarity, precision, and quiet power.
The next chapter isn’t resistance.
It’s construction.
Not of new ideologies.
Not of false nostalgias.
But of something better: personal systems that function when the public ones don’t.
That’s what comes next.
You are not crazy.
You are not powerless.
You are just—finally—operating without the illusion.
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Please comment, if you think I missed something or have something to add.
If this reframed the world for you—good. That was the point.
But clarity isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.
Build your sovereign strategy at Borderless Living
That’s where we make all the stuff we’re discussing at TLM operational.
Residency. Asset protection. Legal arbitrage. Real-world infrastructure.
The Sovereign Guide is live—and it’s the next step if you’re done waiting for the system to work. We have guides, articles, a discord, and more coming every day.
Because seeing it is only the start.
Building something better—that’s on you.
As always, thanks for reading.
Many of you may not know who Susan Strange is, so here’s a quick primer. Strange was a foundational thinker in international political economy who challenged the dominance of state-centric theories in global affairs. In her landmark book The Retreat of the State (1996), she argued that states were no longer the dominant actors in global politics. Instead, power shifted to markets, multinational corporations, and transnational institutions. She called this the rise of “structural power”—forms of control over knowledge, finance, production, and security that no longer depended on formal state authority.
Her core thesis was that the state is retreating not through conquest, but through irrelevance—outsourced, privatized, and outpaced by global capitalism. At the time, it was a radical claim. Today, it reads like prophecy.
The counterargument to Strange was that “globalization” was tempered by power imbalances among nations. For a time, that appeared to be the case. As I’ll argue in this piece, relative power may no longer matter with the rise of actors like Bezos, Musk, Apple, Amazon, and others, who can move at velocities and with power that 99% of states cannot.
The core idea with Strange, however, is that states would collapse and fall away, perhaps consumed by transnational actors such as corporations. We definitely see this type of idea in fiction where “Corpos” wind up controlling landmasses or are quasi-governmental bodies. This is perhaps the type of future that Strange was attempting to predict.
That’s not the future I see. States will remain. Just their relevance may be less so. Companies will also likely remain—and their continued relevance also remains to be seen.
Francis Fukuyama made this argument in his 1989 essay and 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, where he claimed liberal democracy represented the final form of human government—a kind of ideological endpoint. He didn’t literally mean events would stop, but that Western liberalism had “won” the debate. Then came coups, genocides, digital authoritarianism, populist revolts, and algorithmic chaos. So… yeah. About that.
Zygmunt Bauman introduced the “liquid modernity” concept to describe a world where long-standing social structures—work, nation, religion, identity—had dissolved into instability. In a liquid modern world, everything flows, nothing solidifies, and individuals are left to improvise meaning without institutional coherence. It was a powerful metaphor for the precarity of late-stage capitalism. But what we’re living through now may be something else: not just liquidity, but breakdown of the container itself.
Ulrich Beck was a German sociologist known for coining the term “risk society.” In his 1986 book of the same name, he argued that industrial modernity had given way to a new era where societies were defined not by shared progress, but by shared exposure to manufactured risks—nuclear, environmental, financial, and technological. He saw institutions fraying under the weight of their contradictions, but still assumed actors could identify and manage those risks. We’re facing risk without clarity, governance without coordination, outcomes without logic. This type of model is close, but it’s no cigar. Beck probably saw the earliest symptoms of the world we now live in. Had he lived longer, he probably would have beaten me to the punchline.
Waltz, not the choreographer. It’s perhaps a poli sci joke—but Kenneth Waltz is widely considered one of the most influential international relations theorists of the 20th century. His magnum opus, Man, the State, and War, didn’t just explore the causes of conflict—it introduced a structured way to analyze power at multiple levels: individual, state, and systemic. Even his critics respect the coherence and ambition of the work. So yes, it may be hubris to suggest that Stochastic Anarchy belongs in the same theoretical arena as neorealism. I haven’t subjected it to that level of formal rigor (yet). But I do think it has the potential to function as a meta-framework—one that better accounts for the fractured, probabilistic, post-legible world we’re actually living in now.
There's a reason the original Mad Max movie is so unnerving: The systems exist still, held together by the people who refused to accept the reality of its shell: law exists but who upholds it, who defines it and what does it even serve. In the end, you have Max fully realizing his individual sovereignty, for better or worse.
This is probably your best work yet, and I still think you're going to outperform this article soon enough. Can't wait for the next drop.