11 Sep 2025 1 min read writing

Skin in the Game

"Remember how we used to mock Danny for always saying it can happen here?"

"The hardcore dude with the word 'Filth’ tattooed on his neck? The one who stays in that warehouse on Bleecker?"

"Yeah. You know, I’ve been thinking. He’s been right about almost everything. Election capture, institutional rot, the whole slow-motion democratic collapse. Called it, with certainty, years before the think tank people with their careful language and their insider knowledge."

"But, I mean, we still have checks and balances. Courts. The grinding machinery of bureaucracy and all of that."

"I used to think so, too. The government is so heavy that it cannot be moved. All that institutional weight, like geological time, like tectonic plates. Surely that means something."

"Surely."

"But Danny, he sees the weight differently. Weight as too much too brittle. When something massive gets stressed it doesn't bend gracefully around the pressure. It fractures along fault lines."

"The complexity I thought was armor—all those overlapping jurisdictions, those baroque procedural requirements—Danny sees attack surfaces. Places where someone with bad intentions can insert a crowbar."

"So our elaborate safeguards make us more vulnerable?"

"Maybe. And here's the thing that really gets me. Danny doesn't own stock. Doesn't have a pension tied to market performance or career prospects to consider. His material reality is already post-apocalyptic, so he doesn't need to believe in continuity."

"While we do."

"We need the system to work because we've built our lives inside it. Danny can look at power structures and expect them to behave like power structures. No wishful thinking required."

"The guy who eats expired yogurt from behind Whole Foods understands institutional dynamics better than people with degrees in institutional dynamics."

"He's not trying to be right about anything. That might be his advantage."

"Maybe investment kills objectivity."