The global system is less a well-oiled machine and more a Jenga tower of vested interests, teetering on the edge of collapse—but held together by the shared fear of losing one’s own block. It stays upright not by design brilliance, but by inertia, intimidation, and a stubborn refusal to imagine alternatives. As in …
Inertia of the comfortable
Those with power—states, corporations, elites, and multilateral institutions—are quite content, thank you. Change threatens their positions. So they:
Delay reform by insisting they need more data or need more time to think. There is always one more impact assessment to commission, one more committee to convene, one more future meeting to vaguely schedule. This bureaucratic procrastination is not accidental. It is governance as a stalling tactic.
Dilute pressure by claiming they are listening to all stakeholders. Of course, some stakeholders are given plush conference rooms and buffet lunches, while others are kept in the waiting room. Inclusivity, it seems, has tiers.
Distract dissent with an endless stream of spectacle—sports tournaments, algorithmically curated outrage, and shiny gadgets, algorithmically curated outrage, and shiny gadgets that offer neither ownership nor liberation. The trick is to keep people too entertained, angry, or exhausted to organise.
Why fix what continues to benefit them?
Vested interests and institutional capture
Institutions are meant to regulate, redistribute, and reform. In practice, they have become prestige hotels for privilege:
The IMF continues to prescribe austerity as if it were a multivitamin—universally applicable, mildly unpleasant (to the IMF), and backed by questionable science. The effects are well-known: reduced public services, rising inequality, and social unrest. But old habits die hard, especially when they serve creditors.
The UN Security Council is stuck in 1945 cosplay. It clings to its permanent members and veto powers like sacred relics, despite representing a world order that has long since expired. Reform is regularly proposed and just as regularly buried beneath procedural molasses.
Corporate lobbyists write legislation with pens dipped in shareholder ink. Elected officials are, more often than not, mere stenographers. The democratic process may still involve voting, but the drafting process involves dinners, donations, and discreet drafting notes.
The global system is not broken. It was built this way—to stabilise privilege, not to challenge it.
Fear of the alternative
Most actors know the system is rigged. However:
The status quo offers predictability, however grim. Leaders may not like the current arrangement, but at least they understand its rhythms and rules. Chaos, on the other hand, threatens to knock over the whole board—and no one is keen to lose their seat. Mind you, the people in the districts are already experiencing chaos and unpredictability.
Change is difficult to coordinate, particularly across borders. National interests, regional rivalries, and cultural differences make joint action excruciatingly slow, if not impossible. Getting the world to agree on anything more complex than a non-binding resolution is a small miracle.
Any serious reform sounds like someone else’s revolution. Every call for justice is heard as a demand for sacrifice—from someone else’s comfort, someone else’s growth, someone else’s military budget (their minds play zero-sum games). And so, change is politely applauded in principle and blocked in practice.
Would one prefer a crumbling neoliberal consensus or full-blown chaos with machetes and ration books? Most quietly choose the former.
Systemic self-replication
Global capitalism is not just greedy—it is path-dependent. Everything from:
Trade systems are structured to assume current hierarchies will persist. Tariff regimes, bilateral agreements, and supply chain logic all rest on the assumption that labour is cheap somewhere, and consumption is reliable elsewhere.
Credit rating agencies function less as neutral assessors and more as enforcers of the status quo. Their downgrades punish deviation from orthodoxy and reward austerity like a Victorian schoolmaster with a fetish for spreadsheets.
Supply chains stretch across continents in brittle, exploitative configurations that leave little room for ethical or ecological considerations. But changing them would require asking difficult questions—so instead, we count carbon credits.
The bloody Excel spreadsheets of intergovernmental budgets reflect an obsessive faith in linear projections and market-based solutions, even when faced with systemic collapse. Bureaucrats plug in the numbers, the formulas spit out forecasts, and everyone pretends this is planning.
Rewiring the system is not only undesirable to those in charge—it is technically exhausting and politically fatal.
Divide, distract, defuse
Power maintains itself by:
Pitting left against right, ensuring that political discourse resembles a poorly refereed pub brawl, rather than a collective negotiation over shared futures. While citizens fight over cultural grievances, capital slips out the back door.
Turning workers against migrants, deploying the old trick of blaming outsiders for economic insecurity caused by decades of deregulation and wage suppression. It is cheaper than fixing the problem and far more electorally effective.
Branding dissenters as extremists, regardless of whether they are asking for clean water or tax justice. Once labelled, they can be ignored, surveilled, or removed from public discourse under the guise of national security.
Offering entertainment in place of information, flooding the public sphere with triviality until meaningful engagement becomes a chore. It is not censorship—it is distraction, scaled up and personalised.
This is not a bug. It is the default interface of late-stage governance.
Global south? Extracted and ignored
For much of the world, the status quo means hunger, debt, surveillance, and forced export economies. But:
Debt ensures obedience, with nations trapped in cycles of borrowing to repay previous loans, often for infrastructure they never asked for and that never benefits them. It is financial colonialism with a friendlier font.
Aid comes with conditions, typically written in donor capitals and disguised as helpful suggestions. Accepting it often requires privatising services, cutting subsidies, or allowing foreign companies first dibs on natural resources.
Trade remains asymmetrical, with “free” trade agreements offering freedom for capital but not for people, and opening up southern markets to northern goods without the means to compete.
Resistance is either co-opted or crushed, with popular movements undermined by corruption, foreign interference, or brute force. If that fails, their leaders are invited to conferences and handed pamphlets.
The resources keep flowing north. The climate pain remains south. Colonialism never ended—it merely rebranded.
Patriarchy: the invisible architecture
The global system’s status quo is not just economic or geopolitical—it is profoundly gendered. Patriarchy is not a crack in the wall. It is the blueprint.
International institutions were born from wars negotiated almost entirely by men. Their structures reflect this heritage: hierarchical, militarised, and allergic to care-oriented thinking.
Masculine-coded values—domination, competition, control—are celebrated as virtues, embedded in everything from diplomatic language to economic modelling. Empathy is often seen as a liability.
Care, equity, and interdependence? Kindly relocated to the margins, usually discussed after lunch, in side events with bad coffee. They are considered admirable, but not central.
Women, queer people, and nonbinary individuals are frequently excluded from decision-making, unless they accept the rules of the boys’ club—and even then, with limited influence. Their presence is often used as decoration, not disruption.
White male privilege: the operating system
The global ruleset was devised by colonial powers, written in the handwriting of white men in dark suits. The legacy endures like cheap aftershave:
Trade routes still mirror colonial extraction patterns, moving raw materials from poor countries to rich ones, where they are refined, branded, and sold back at a premium. The extraction economy never took a lunch break.
Development aid comes with subtle (and not so subtle) ideological strings, often requiring the adoption of Western values, governance models, and market preferences. It is assistance with a script.
Global capital flows freely to New York and London, while brown and black migrants are detained, drowned, or deported. Money has more rights than people. Especially if those people are inconvenient.
The dominance of white, Western male perspectives narrows the policy imagination, prioritising their stability over everyone else’s justice. Diversity, if acknowledged at all, is something to be managed—not centred.
Masculinist resilience
Even the language of resilience is soaked in masculine paranoia:
Build walls instead of communities. It is easier to fortify than to collaborate. Concrete does not ask difficult questions.
Hoard resources instead of sharing them. One must always prepare for a rainy day, even if it is raining on someone else right now.
Militarise borders instead of addressing root causes. No need to rethink the model if one can simply keep out the consequences.
This is not resilience. It is fortress-building disguised as pragmatism, complete with surveillance drones and bottled water.
Who pays the price
It is always the same groups who carry the costs:
Women and marginalised groups perform the care work when austerity guts public services. The unpaid labour of millions keeps societies functioning, while policymakers slash budgets with surgical precision and no aftercare.
They bear the brunt of climate catastrophe, displacement, and resource scarcity, living on the frontlines of crisis without the luxury of retreat. Adaptation is not a plan—it is a necessity.
They are routinely excluded from peace negotiations, despite suffering the most from war. When the shooting stops, the room fills with suits and powerpoints, not with those who buried the dead and fed the displaced.
And when the system fails—as it routinely does—they are told to be resilient. Translation: endure more, with fewer resources, and preferably without complaining.
Imagine what Haymitch would say
Haymitch, with a half-empty bottle and a fully-loaded sarcasm cannon, would probably say something like:
“Status quo? Oh yes, that lovely little arrangement where the same people keep winning, the same people keep losing, and the rest of us get to applaud politely from the rubble. Cheers.”
Then he would take a swig, glance at the Capitol broadcast still flickering on the screen, and mutter—
“They call it peace. I call it sedation with marketing.”
And if pressed further by some bright-eyed rebel intern asking what can be done, he might grunt:
“Well, kid, you could try playing their game and hope you come out alive. Or, and hear me out, you could stop pretending the arena ever had rules in your favour and play some non-zero-sum games instead. “
Dry, bitter, and tragically accurate—Haymitch’s wisdom tends to hit home disguised as a joke.