The post-WWII order felt final. Total war was won. Industry surged. Suburbs sprawled. But within a generation, the seams tore. Inflation spiked. Trust collapsed. Assassinations, oil shocks, military failure. The gold standard was abandoned. Cocaine flowed north. A new architecture never emerged—only patchwork. Since then, we’ve been recycling forms, extending systems built for a world that no longer exists. We didn’t run out of time. We ran out of vision.
Principle
Without a generative myth, society reverts to maintenance. The modern world has been in administrative mode since the seventies. It adapts to crisis, reacts to novelty, manages decline—but it no longer produces futures. Culture splits into nostalgia and novelty. Politics regresses. Institutions grow brittle. Technology accelerates, but its telos is unclear. In the absence of purpose, tools become toys. Expansion without meaning is just drift.
Application
Reject drift. Your role is not to predict the future, but to choose one worth building. Start by defining what expansion means at the scale you can control—your family, your work, your land. Set direction beyond income or status. Plant trees you won’t sit under. Develop layered, transferable capabilities that grow over time and across domains—instead of stacking job titles for status. Pursue competency in disciplines that have outlasted empires—farming, carpentry, mathematics, governance, language.
Form a household economy. Shift from consumption to production. Create food, power, shelter, stories. Anchor to land if possible. If not, anchor to craft. Not for nostalgia, but for independence. Build things you can hand off. Raise children to outlast you. Study the mythic structures of old not to repeat them, but to learn how civilizations framed duty, expansion, and time.
Do this with full awareness that it won’t look heroic. It will look local, manual, and slow. But civilizational repair does not begin in boardrooms. It begins wherever someone says: this ends with me. This restarts here.
Limit / Cost
Mythmaking requires personal discipline. Most aren't ready. They confuse preference with principle, trend with truth. Rebuilding means sacrifice: of convenience, of validation, of speed. It demands silence, study, and hard labor. You won’t be celebrated. You’ll be tested. Because if it’s easy, it’s not myth—it’s marketing. Real renewal is earned, not branded.