Moments In Flow

Tag: system

  • Financial Architecture, Deflection, and the Next Sacrificial Lamb

    The Powell Memo: The Blueprint Nobody Reads But Everyone Lives In August 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell—soon to be elevated to the Supreme Court—sent a confidential memorandum to his friend Eugene Sydnor at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He titled it “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” The tone was martial. Powell wrote:…

  • The Diffuse Symbol: How Societies Manage Collective Emotion Without Creating a Target

    Introduction: Two Architectures of Exclusion Every society generates collective emotion—anxiety, resentment, humiliation, fear—and every society must find somewhere to put it. The grievance that produced the feeling may be long gone. The feeling remains. It sits there, looking for a discharge point. This is not a moral story. It is a systems story. And the…

  • The Coming Divorce: Washington, Brussels, and the New Puritan Century

    By an observer of the long cycle There is a story the commentariat keeps telling itself, and it is wrong. The story is that the transatlantic alliance is enduring a “rough patch” — a temporary spat between allies who will, once the current occupant of the White House leaves, return to business as usual. That…