Everyone in the room understands the situation.
The system is extractive. It is locked into growth. It is driving us, with mathematical precision, into a wall.
We have a name for this. We have books about it. We have podcasts. We have conferences. We have a generation of thinkers who can describe the Moloch of it all in their sleep.
And still.
The money does not move.
I sat with Jim Rutt this week to ask, plainly: why is it so hard to get systems change funded? Jim has been in this field since 2012. He has had the conversations. He has watched the wallets stay closed.
His first answer is the one I keep hearing in my own life. Most of the people who are psychographically aligned with what we are trying to do are young, successful entrepreneurs. They cannot get their head around anything that is not a business. They keep trying to turn Game B, or metamodernism, or whatever you want to call the work, into a profitable venture.
That is not what this is.
The pure philanthropic ask, for something that does not promise a return, gets close to zero. And the sums we are talking about are not even astronomical. We are not asking for trillions. We are asking for what a single hundred metre yacht costs.
Still no.
So what is going on?
Two camps emerge among people with significant wealth. Both groups have understood that the system is breaking.
The first camp says: collapse is coming, I will make sure that a small radius around me is safe, the rest is not my problem. Maybe some of it going away is even fine. This is the bunker strategy. This is where no funding for systems change will ever come from.
The second camp says: yes, we need to move toward something life serving, something heliogenic, something like Game B. Then they fixate on a single piece of the problem. Education. Food. Energy. Governance. They will fund the part they understand and refuse to fund the whole, even though everyone in the conversation knows the whole is the point.
This is the first wall.
The second wall is the legitimate question hiding inside it. What is the money actually for? What gets built? What can a funder point at after the cheque is cashed?
The honest answer is that you cannot flip the global system by main force. The trillions sloshing through the financial markets, locked into profit maximization by their growth obligations, dwarf anything philanthropy could marshal. The strategy has to be different.
Demonstration at scale.
Twenty, fifty, a hundred communities operating under the new paradigm. Open. Visitable. Airbnbs so people can come and live inside a different operating system for a week. If the thesis is right, and we do not yet know that it is, then those demonstrations create a wave. People come, people see, people return changed. Resources begin to flow. Something like an origin of life event.
That is the realistic play.
Which raises the harder question.
When does the opening come?
I keep thinking about the Arab Spring. The vegetable seller in Tunis who set himself on fire was the trigger, but the trigger only worked because years of preparation had been funded underneath it. People had been quietly building groups that could rise in the moment.
What if something similar could be prepared for the next big correction?
A 2008 sized financial crisis is the obvious candidate. Jim’s read, which I share, is that the accumulation of public and private debt across the industrialized world, with the partial exception of Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden, looks unsustainable. The 2008 crisis was about 800 billion. The US alone now carries something like 30 trillion in national debt. The next correction will probably be bigger.
When it comes, it could come tomorrow afternoon. It could come in ten years. The financial markets run on the anticipation of anticipation of anticipation, which means today’s facts do not have to trigger anything. The probability of future facts cycling backward through belief is enough.
There are signals to watch. Interest rates on bonds from supposedly stable countries. The moment Japan starts selling its US treasuries instead of buying them.
But the timing is unknowable. What is knowable is that the window will open.
The question is what is in place when it does.
In Game B’s framing, crises increase the osmotic pressure of people wanting to move into different membranes. If a few hundred well functioning communities exist when the crisis hits, the pressure pushes people across the membrane. The communities take in newcomers, split, form new communities, grow in spurts driven by the crisis.
If nothing is in place, the pressure dissipates. Or worse, it gets captured by reactionary movements that are very much in place and very well funded.
So what needs to be ready?
First, the demonstrations themselves. The proto communities. Either built from scratch, or selected from existing intentional communities whose DNA is already aligned and which need scaffolding rather than invention. Most existing intentional communities will not qualify. They were built as one offs, not as seeds of a viral movement, and many carry strong points of view that would not generalize. But some might.
Second, a population of associates. People who do not yet live inside the new structures but who think in their terms. Who are running babysitting cooperatives, car shares, dinner parties operating under the new logic. Who are preloaded with the why before the crisis arrives. Today this group is in the hundreds of thousands. It needs to be in the millions.
Third, the cultural carriers. Young people, because the future is always young people. Independent media. Public intellectuals. Artists. Musicians. Filmmakers. Poets. The people who can metabolize the ideas into forms that travel further than essays do.
Notice who is not on that list.
Politicians.
Jim is firm on this and I have come around to it. Politicians no longer lead the public. They follow it. They map themselves to whatever the conventional wisdom is. The few who break from the conventional wisdom break in the reactionary direction, toward nationalism and retrograde social arrangements. The road to political change runs through public sentiment, not through politicians.
You change the public. The politicians follow.
But there is a fourth piece, and this is the one that nags at me most.
Pre legislation.
When the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation wanted to reshape the United States, they did not wait for the moment to arrive and then start drafting policy. They wrote the handbooks years in advance. Project 2025, whatever you think of its content, is a remarkably detailed and intelligent document. The Trump administration’s speed of action would have been impossible without that preparation.
There is no equivalent on the life serving side.
There are partial efforts. The Center for Humane Technology. A handful of small think tanks with a few million in annual budget. Nothing at the scale of Heritage. Nothing operating with the assumption that legislation will be needed and that drafts ready in a drawer are worth more than drafts written in a panic.
This may be the single biggest gap in the field.
A think tank for a life serving civilization. Serious policy writeups. Draft legislation. Modular, ready to be picked up by any aligned policymaker in any jurisdiction the moment the window opens. Game B has always penciled this in as the Game B Foundation. Nobody has built it.
So why has nobody built it?
Here is where the conversation got uncomfortable.
The neoliberal think tanks are funded so well because they are self serving for their funders. Lower taxes. Less regulation. More room for capital. The wealthy donor who funds Cato is funding their own portfolio.
The pro social side is the opposite. You are asking wealthy people to fund work that runs against their immediate personal benefit. That is always harder than asking people to fund work that flatters their interests.
And the deeper thing, which I have been turning over for days now: anyone with a large pool of capital, whether inherited or earned, has learned the game that produced that capital. They have absorbed its logic at a level below thought. They know how the extractive system functions because they have functioned inside it. Stepping out of that pattern, letting go of that legacy, is genuinely hard. Not philosophically hard. Hard in the body.
This may be the actual reason systems change does not get funded. The people with the means to fund it cannot quite think the thoughts that would make funding it feel right.
And yet.
There is a category of holder I keep coming back to. The people with vastly more than they can ever spend. The ones for whom another yacht, another house, another foundation in their own name, has stopped meaning anything. The ones who are starting to think about legacy. About descendants. About what humanity will look like when their grandchildren are old.
For that person, this is not philanthropy. It is the most rational wager available. A bet that the trajectory of the species can be improved, and that being a quiet architect of that improvement is a better legacy than another wing of another museum.
If that person is reading this: you know how to find Jim. You know how to find me.
The window is opening either way.
The question is whether anything is built before it does.
