The world makes little sense anymore because we live within systems that have become detached from the systems they exist in which themselves have become detached from the systems they exist in...somewhere in that stack of systems is the physical world we want to understand.
To further complicate, many of those systems have provided tangible material benefit to many (often at the expense of others). The systems are no less real than the physical world because they operate over the physical world.
Our current economic & political ridiculousness is, in part, a failure of neoliberalism, itself a detachment from classical "money" economics, which is itself a detachment from the resource-limited world we live in. All a gross simplification of history, circumstance and power.
We spend a lot of time arguing over the boundaries and borders of those systems without ever zooming out to view the entirety of the systems we built and have lived in, and are in many ways trapped by.
No model of any system is completely accurate, humans like simple stories and the world and systems we live in are ridiculously complicated and contorted, their motivations lost to history and exaggerated through speculation and abstraction.
We like to tell stories of economists so enthralled by their own models they developed a financial system detached from reality, and stories of monolithic secret cabals that purposely designed systems they could exploit. Stories with many inaccurate accuracies.
We are naive of history because history was badly documented, deliberately obscured, flatteringly interpreted and rose-coloured. We anthropomorphise nations and governments because systems are hard to grasp.
And for the most part there isn't much we has individual humans can do about any of that. In many ways these systems exist apart from us, and the majority of resistance against them is in the form of extending another system which itself isn't anymore reflective of "reality".
At best we can perhaps advocate for systems which result in people having more power, which is to say, systems that are better at resisting coercion. Sound money, worker-owned companies, electoral reform, education, or social safety nets are all forms of decentralization.
What and how you're decentralizing differs depending on the systems you perceive as broken. The fundamental truth being that every system is broken and perverted from multiple perspectives because systems aren't designed, they evolve with us.
If I have any hope for the future it is that people can learn to understand that everything we know is a story about a story about a story, that we can learn to understand those stories, and that we can learn to tell better ones.
