For decades I worked in the biggest rooms, with the people at the top of everything, and everyone around them – politicians, heads of industry, managers, people on the ground, and the children and spouses of all of them. All the while I was studying how the world actually runs, how the minds running it work, and where it originates. What I understood was tested on live systems, where being wrong showed.
Everyone I worked with stood in one room, holding one seat. I moved through all of them. Rooms where tech giants schemed against tech giants through financed think tanks and PR agencies, with every major law firm kept on retainer so none could appear for the other side. The room where an official in a Prime Minister’s office weighed his desire to do genuinely good work in Africa against the empire’s agenda. The room where the chief minister of a newly minted state balanced the centre, the local goons, and the trajectory he wanted for his state. And the family dinners of all such men, where the succession sat unspoken. I took a seat in none of them. The picture I was after comes together only across the rooms — no one stationed in a single room can see it.
What I found held at every level, in every decade.
No one has the complete picture, least of all the people supposed to have it. They sit in the most precarious seats of all, and nearly everything they have goes into one task. Keeping what exists in balance.
There is very good science for every domain and every subdomain. It almost never reaches the people who need it. And everything that change requires – curiosity, agency, resources, good intentions, competence – exists. It never exists together.
The top seat does things to whoever sits in it. I never met an exception. The climb happens once. No one who made it can separate what was them and what was chance. Success seals the room, because past a certain height every voice that reaches you depends on you, and nothing true survives that journey. The most surrounded people are the least witnessed. By the time the seat is yours, its agency is already spent keeping the structure up, and change arrives as a threat to a wall you are personally holding.
The trails converged. The origin is real, and it sits further back than anyone in the rooms is looking. The investigation is closed.
Seeing this took everything a life is otherwise made of. On the surface it looked like sacrifice. To my understanding it was the best use of a brain and a life like mine.
Before all this, there was a thought I had as a child. It has come first ever since. Everything on this page happened in its service.
What remains is the completed picture, and the mind the search built. Both have one use – fundamental change at the level where civilisation is designed. That is the work now.