Essay: You cannot eat code

Recently, I spent a week with senior executives from some of the largest companies in the world. When I asked them, “What are your contingency plans for the worst-case scenario?” they unanimously said, “We are seeking opportunities in this crisis.”

Not a single one of them has plans for a sovereign crisis. And when I say that, I mean a national-level failure, such as what the UAE experienced during the Iran war, or what the UK is experiencing post-Brexit. In other words, a crisis that affects every part of the nation and cannot be resolved internally through hedging.

It seems to me that the leaders forged in the last 50 years are not made to traverse the fires of the next 50 years. We started seeing this in 2020, and in their own words, “We did not learn from the Pandemic.”

For fifty years, the neoliberal global economy has systematically decoupled wealth from physical productivity. Money was abstracted into debt instruments. Work was abstracted into digital metrics. Innovation was abstracted into software for the elite. The system rewarded “show horses” performing digital rent-seeking and financial engineering, while starving the “work horses” solving existential material problems: people, resources, human systems.

Abstraction promised an end to friction. But removing it creates fragility. When a system abstracts reality until it is untethered from the physical world, it loses its bearings. This is what happened in 1453. Then it collapses.

That collapse is upon us, manifesting as what I call the “Neoliberal Flood”: a chaotic downpour that washes away untethered abstractions, fragile optimizations, performative innovation, and the certainties of an unbalanced unipolar world. There is no Yang without Yin. When maritime chokepoints close, satellites are jammed by electronic warfare, and financial rails are weaponized, abstracted systems do not bend. They shatter.

Taking millions in venture capital to build an app connecting people with dogs is not innovation; it is the luxury of an abstract economy. True innovation is material: the resistance in a warzone purifying sewage into drinking water while fighting a 21st century adversary with DIY weapons. When the Flood arrives, capital allocators discover you cannot eat code, or drink a software valuation.

This is not a market correction, it is the convergence of many historical cycles, the 2500, 500, and 50 to name a few. It is a civilizational pivot into a Second Axial Age. The philosopher Karl Jaspers defined the original Axial Age (roughly 800-200 BC) as the moment humanity shifted from externalized myth to internalized sovereignty, triggered by the collapse of Bronze Age empires. The Axial Age birthed grounded philosophies to navigate a broken world.

Today empires are collapsing again: financialization and artificial intelligence have abstracted reality to the point of hallucination, while kinetic war and resource nationalism have returned. It will be a chaotic but predictable return to material reality and indigenous values.

When Lebanon’s abstracted neoliberal banking sector collapsed in 2019, wiping out people’s savings, the population did not perish. It adapted. It bypassed the failing center and built localized realities: generating its own electricity and water, running cash economies that outperformed the abstraction. Lebanon proved you can not only survive the Neoliberal Flood, but emerge stronger.

This is the Sovereign Paradigm: survival requires a shift from abstraction to material autonomy. True resilience cannot be borrowed, outsourced, or optimized away. It must be forged through inescapable friction.

The frictionless economy runs on one flawed premise: the Treadmill. A perfectly engineered surface that claims to improve on the real world, it breaks the imperfect systems, demanding the same step until it fractures. And it lacks sovereignty: the machine moves you; you do not move yourself.

Perfection breaks us. The real world heals us. The ground - cracked, uneven, and resistant - forces constant micro-adjustment, building density and antifragility. Only an imperfect surface can hold an imperfect system in balance. To survive the Neoliberal Flood, step off the Treadmill and onto the ground.

The ground is the terrain the Chariot was built to cross. Harking back to the First Axial Age’s defining technology, the Chariot is the ultimate stress-test for hostile terrain. Its five load-bearing components map onto any person, organization, or system. A failure in one cascades through the whole vehicle; abstract one, and the Chariot breaks.

Ground (The Terrain). The surface you move on: material resources, localized generation, and hard assets. Real ground resists and tells the truth; it is where all things grow. Abstracted ground is the Treadmill that moves you but never forward.

Wheel (The Motion). What you do: your work, output, the visible self in motion. The neoliberal cycle rewarded show horses performing digital rent-seeking; the coming cycle demands work horses moving physical atoms. A real Wheel is earned through labor; an abstracted one performs motion but is not in motion.

Hub (The Alignment). What you believe: the values and culture that hold the Wheel steady. A resilient Hub is built from within, on sovereign self-reliance and indigenous values. Imported ideological hubs are borrowed centers that fracture under pressure.

Axle (The Load-Bearing Body). The body and nervous system bearing the load and friction across the Chariot. An abstracted axle is sealed from external forces, and propped up by optimizations that mask its limitations. A forged axle is tempered by unmediated reality, building natural capacity without snapping.

Vessel (The Rider and Legacy). The rider: the soul, identity, and succession it carries. An abstracted vessel carries a lot of nothingness, paper gold. A material vessel grows by carrying its people and their resources. Its purpose is shaped in the real world that it navigates, the journey it takes, and the destinations it arrives at.

The audit is not a verdict; it is a starting point. No Chariot begins fully forged. The abstractions it exposes can be made material again, but only through friction. Resilience is earned, not given. It is built the way a baseline is built, one step in front of the other, on the ground. The work begins now, while there is still ground to step on.

The Neoliberal Flood is not the end; it is the clearing. It wears away every abstraction until only the real remains. The era of unicorns is over. The era of the sovereign has begun. You cannot eat code, and you cannot drink a valuation, but a Chariot forged on real ground does not drown in the Flood. It carries you to the other side.

Samer Karam (LinkedIn) is a Sovereign Architect and strategic advisor. His upcoming book “The Human Baseline” maps the learnings of his ‘1,000-day run-streak’ onto people, organizations, and systems navigating the Neoliberal Flood.