The System Has No Mouth, and It Must Scream

Metaphors to make sense of chaos.

Mar 15, 2025

An aerial view of a raft made of logs on water. There are gaps in between the logs and it isn't well-suited for carrying passengers. — *Photo by Lennart Heim on Unsplash*

You need people to lead and experience lives differently than yours. Without the farmer, we do not have food.

When an entire workforce is erased in a matter of days, a void opens and then pulls back in. In the case of bureaucracy, the people are locked out and the structures go unused, abandoned. The doors become walls. Blank boxes on a form become abstract symbols of where to insert meaning. Keyboards do not click. Trash bags do not get changed. Toilet paper is not purchased. Data that wasn't erased fades away. Laws meticulously written, debated on, and died for start to wither on the vine.

I can see the future videos: "federal nature center abandoned in 2025 contains preserved taxidermy from the 1940s."

This system demands the people work, but the highest-funded governing body and one of the country's largest employers just forced everyone out, with still more being cut. Congress is watching the tides rise around it. The person orchestrating the largest federal layoffs in American history was not someone the people voted for, but a conspirator with who was.

The reverberations of this void are shaking up the daily experiences of virtually every person on the planet. The imperial core has just imploded, and the leaders are building their house with splinters before the dust even settles.

What world do our leaders imagine? One where they are immune to the laws as we know them. One where they can order erasure, and it will be done. One where they can survive and laugh with their riches while the world burns. It isn't particularly chromatic, or flashy, or utopian. It is unfettered greed.

Of course, no greed is truly unfettered. Even ever-abundant Mother Earth has her limits.

For the rest of us, the decisions we make now will shape the future as it falls around us. Where we as individuals pivot in this moment will show us where our instincts lead in times of absolute chaos. We must pause to listen before gripping the first solid thing we find. It probably won't be solid tomorrow. It might not have to be.

I have not been on traditional social media since mid-February. Social media feels like the equivalent of being in an arcade wind machine with money blowing all around me. I can stand and grab at what I see, disoriented, or get out and watch where the money settles.

News, ideas, conspiracies, bots, noise noise noise. The system has no mouth and it must scream.1 We have mouths but we can't scream for fear of being institutionalized.

Systems don't have to be personified to be killing us. Our leaders are placing very little intention, or attention, into their current decisions, besides which decisions yield die-hard followers. We don't live in a mega computer playing with our fleshy forms like toys for its own pleasure.2 We live in a world populated by living creatures. The bots are puppets of a human ideology, saying our words back to us.

A country3 is a wooden raft that can only navigate waters as well as it has balance, foundation, and commitment. Its resources must be well-distributed and the citizens must work towards mutual stability. Losing even one person affects the whole.

In the last 50 or so years, our country's resources were piled in the middle of our raft, and less money was put into its overall foundation. The ideological misalignments became more pronounced than ever. Truthfully, individuals in this country always disagreed on how to achieve balance, safety, harmony, and prosperity.4

The decades of resource-piling created a vast tower of weight in the middle of a threadbare structure. 10 or so people stood at the tippy-top of the tower, with the rest of us on a flat surface below, struggling for scraps.

This wealth structure destabilized the raft. The people at the top felt secure with the wide breadth of bare wood buoying them in the water - they couldn't imagine waves big enough to topple them. For us living at the base closest to the water, things had only become more and more unpredictable.

The waves are still getting bigger, the waters choppier for longer stretches. Many have been lost.

The tower only kept growing. Eventually, the only resource left to pile was the wood to the raft itself. The people up top demanded this wood be disassembled and added to their pile. Given the lack of resources on the raft, not many were inclined to do this task, but enough did for a spot closer to the center. It wasn't easy work. People live on all corners of the raft and are inclined to fight for their livelihoods.

The leaders, unsatisfied with the pace of this dismantling, decided to fuck around and find out. They demolished the raft entirely, a form of collective punishment for the impossible.

It is fun, it is sport, it is richer beyond anyone's wildest dreams. And, their tower is doomed to fall. It is only a matter of time.

I am here, treading the water with you. Be careful who offers you a hand. It isn't too late for us.

A Perspective of Leaves

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