Finally, someone is articulating what I’ve been seeing since the beginning. You’re quite right, and I wish I were going to be around long enough to see the results. I am, however, extraordinarily grateful to be living in this time with this man leading us into that future. Walt Whitman said it well, “…to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.”
I’ve worked extensively with Requisite Org. And agree with your assessment. Stratum 7 or 8. Vision. Honesty in communication. “Come the time, cometh the man/ person. I think most canadians are fundamentally jolted enough to trust the longer term nature of the results. Your article helps us see past the short time reporting.
Thank you for your article. I am so proud of Mark Carney as our PM. I will probably not live long enough to see the results but hope my children and grandchildren will benefit from the long term plans being made today.
I am unfamiliar with the leadership strata you use but it makes sense.
Another aspect of this Carney leadership, IMO, is the rejection of short term personal or political goals. He keeps his eyes on the event horizon and fills the needs to get there in spite of political costs.
Politicians, pundits and reporters, I think, miss that immediate costs are not an impediment to the goal of a Canada better able to thrive in a ruptured foreign and economic system.
I knew Elliott Jaques for several years, applying his Stratified Systems Theory, consulting to organizations. I have been thinking the same thing as this article. According to the theory and what I have observed in practice with hundreds of individuals, at his age his cognitive capacity is still growing and will only plateau after his normal life expectancy. Leaves us something to look forward to.
Great article. Too many politicians and people only think weeks or months ahead, or 'What's in it for me.' As a country Canada must actively work towards its future and the generations that are children now. Canada is now at the beginning of a new world order where we join with many other countries in working together. I'm happy Mark Carney is leading the way for our future.
There is a new international organization being established in Canada called the global defence bank. It is set to represent the 5% defence spending of national GDP from 20 countries. The list of countries participating will grow.
World finance numbers show the US is spending more servicing debt than on military (it is trying to pass a $1.4 trillion defence (war) budget now, so war spending stays above debt interest for the time being, keep raising the ceiling.
My question to the the World is this:
Should you spend unparalleled wealth (5% of GDP of 20 industrialized Nations) on the last valuable resources easily accessed on the planet, creating machinery you will never use that runs on fossil fuels? Is this a con? A set up? Second part of the question: if you build up this war machine and use it, what will be left of civilization?
Conclusion: the method of manipulation by the Big Oil - has been to create false demand through the naive stupidity of the Trump administration and MAGA, while using the US military and global banking system to support 5% GDP spending on military. The world needs that money better spent on good government, clean infrastructure, health care, education and sound public policy.
The war is not nation against nation, but civilization against the planet. This budget will tip the scale, and while civilization wins the battle it loses the war, so to speak. 🤷♂️
Brother, thank you for the question. It deserved a real answer rather than a quick one, so I sat with it and wrote a full piece in reply. You will find it below.
Your instinct is right. The spending makes no sense, and Orwell saw the structure of it as far back as 1941 — eight years before 1984 — in a signed essay called Shopkeepers at War, written during the Blitz with German bombers literally over his head. He named the surplus problem plainly, and he never stopped working the diagnosis until the day he died. What you wrote to me is the same diagnosis, eighty-five years later, and the fact that it is still the right diagnosis is itself the point.
What I have tried to do in the reply is hold both things at once — that you are right about the madness, and that there is a seam in the current architecture where the work of building the alternative can actually be done. The piece names that seam. It also names what The Vertical Dispatch is for, why I monitor geopolitics in the first place, and what is being built underneath the daily coverage that almost no one is putting on a single page.
Read it when you have time. Share it with one person who would understand what it is pointing at. The construct of society does not shift through institutions alone. It shifts through people like you, asking the right questions, in their own circles and their own words, until the recognition travels far enough to become unavoidable.
Your vigilance is the material the work is built from. Keep it sharp. Keep writing. And know that the letter you sent is already part of the architecture, whether you intended it that way or not.
Absolutely brilliant analysis. Thank you for sharing this. Now how do we get the message out in the public sphere where soundbites and 30 sec videos feed the masses? Carney is a once in a lifetime leader and I am so grateful he chose to step up for all of us. 🇨🇦
Thank you so much, sister — your message made my morning, and I am laughing because you have just asked the question that keeps every long-form writer awake at night. How do we get a Stratum 8 idea into a thirty-second clip? Better yet — if you crack the code, let me know! 😊
Yep - that is what we are witnessing, but take it one step further, because Carney also seems to realize there needs to be more immediate positive public impact as well.
Aussie here - same! We have an extremely timid Centre-Left national govt with a huge mandate, and virtually zero opposition, with some well-meaning Greens and independents. It is frittering away its time, achieving very little, "while Rome burns".
Great read and observing the reactions, I can only come to the same conclusions of short sightedness and lack of vision. Can you do a deep dive on the Lithium mine in MB which is owned by a Chinese company if that's in your wheelhouse?
Thank you , well articulated - we, the people, have so few examples of politicians in it for the “long game” and I believe Mr Carney is focused on saving the future for our children and I only hope Canadians can hang in there, recognize this and support him too
Nothing matters. Nothing matters because 18 months ago, climate scientists, people Carney used to quote, told us it was over, that our greed and insouciance and taken us over the climate tipping point. Very few journalists reported on their findings because catastrophe only sells if it’s someone else’s. And the first thing Carney did was repeal the carbon tax and support more pipelines.
But, sure. He’s a financial wizard. Money has just never been my benchmark.
Thanks. I will continue to monitor policy. IMO, Carney remains the best person to deal with America under Trump. God knows, PP would have been disastrous. As for the future, I hope you are right and I am wrong.
Thank you for that, sister. The grace in your closing line — I hope you are right and I am wrong — is the posture I wish more readers brought to questions like these, and I want to honour it by being honest with you about what I actually think.
You have framed it as right and wrong, and I would gently push back on that framing — not to score a point, but because I do not think anyone who is being honest can claim to know the future well enough to be right or wrong about it in advance. Heraclitus said it twenty-five hundred years ago and it has not stopped being true since: πάντα ῥεῖ — all is change. You cannot step into the same river twice, because by the time your second foot enters, the river is already a different river and you are already a different person. That is not poetic flourish. That is the actual condition under which all of us, including Carney, including the analysts, including you and me, are trying to make sense of what comes next.
So I do not think this is a question of who turns out to be right. I think it is a question of who keeps watching honestly while the river changes — who updates their reading when the evidence shifts, who refuses to let their early position calcify into a creed, who is willing to say I was wrong about that part, and right about this other part, and I do not yet know about the third. That posture is the only one that survives contact with reality over a long enough horizon. It is also, I think, the posture you just demonstrated in your closing line, which is why I am writing this reply with the care I am.
It is on the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s — the project that nearly bankrupted the country, brought down a government in the Pacific Scandal of 1873, survived a no-confidence vote by a margin so thin historians still argue about it, and ended up being the single piece of infrastructure that determined whether Canada existed from sea to sea or stopped at the Manitoba border. The opposition at the time called it reckless. They called it a giveaway. They called it fiscally irresponsible. They were not wrong on the merits. The investment was genuinely risky. The math did not obviously balance.
And the country exists in its current shape today because Macdonald's government made the bet anyway, because the alternative was not fiscal prudence — the alternative was a smaller country, or no country at all. The lesson is not that government investment always works. The lesson is narrower. There is a category of decision where the return cannot be captured by any private actor, where the time horizon exceeds what the present can evaluate honestly, and where the consequence of not proceeding is permanent foreclosure of possibility. The CPR was that kind of decision. So is what Carney is building now. The judgment of whether he gets it right is one neither of us can render today. The river is still moving.
What I am confident of is that the watching matters. People like you, monitoring policy honestly, holding the long-horizon arguments accountable to the near-term evidence — that is the civic vigilance the architecture actually requires to not become hubris. The work is incomplete without readers who push back, and the next pieces will be sharper because of exchanges like this one. So please keep monitoring. Keep applying the pressure. And if I turn out to be wrong on parts of this, I would rather hear it from a reader who engaged in good faith than discover it in the wreckage years from now.
All is change. The honest watcher is the one who changes with it.
From south of the border: It's amusing (and terrifying) to contrast PM Carney's "Stratum 8" planning horizon with the "Stratum 0.1" span of the U.S. President, who struggles to maintain focus from the beginning of a single sentence until its end.
Finally, someone is articulating what I’ve been seeing since the beginning. You’re quite right, and I wish I were going to be around long enough to see the results. I am, however, extraordinarily grateful to be living in this time with this man leading us into that future. Walt Whitman said it well, “…to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.”
Such a wonderful reply. I feel this also. Exciting.
I’ve worked extensively with Requisite Org. And agree with your assessment. Stratum 7 or 8. Vision. Honesty in communication. “Come the time, cometh the man/ person. I think most canadians are fundamentally jolted enough to trust the longer term nature of the results. Your article helps us see past the short time reporting.
Thank you for your comment. I think you may like this copy https://glenroberts911399.substack.com/p/the-ndps-category-error?r=1pgr4n&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Thank you for your article. I am so proud of Mark Carney as our PM. I will probably not live long enough to see the results but hope my children and grandchildren will benefit from the long term plans being made today.
Thank you for your comments. That is what the Canada Strong Fund is all about: the next generation https://www.sophiainitiative.ai/p/the-canada-strong-fund?r=1pgr4n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I am unfamiliar with the leadership strata you use but it makes sense.
Another aspect of this Carney leadership, IMO, is the rejection of short term personal or political goals. He keeps his eyes on the event horizon and fills the needs to get there in spite of political costs.
Politicians, pundits and reporters, I think, miss that immediate costs are not an impediment to the goal of a Canada better able to thrive in a ruptured foreign and economic system.
See the Amazon link. Thank you for your comment https://a.co/d/07IrYMak
Thank you.
Media in Canada primarily owned by the US is the problem. Most Canadians I believe see PM Carney’s vision for the future
I knew Elliott Jaques for several years, applying his Stratified Systems Theory, consulting to organizations. I have been thinking the same thing as this article. According to the theory and what I have observed in practice with hundreds of individuals, at his age his cognitive capacity is still growing and will only plateau after his normal life expectancy. Leaves us something to look forward to.
Great article. Too many politicians and people only think weeks or months ahead, or 'What's in it for me.' As a country Canada must actively work towards its future and the generations that are children now. Canada is now at the beginning of a new world order where we join with many other countries in working together. I'm happy Mark Carney is leading the way for our future.
i think you will find this article interesting https://www.sophiainitiative.ai/p/the-country-that-almost-didnt-get?r=1pgr4n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Yes, very interesting. Thanks.
A subscriber asked me about this. Here is the copy I wrote to his question https://glenroberts911399.substack.com/p/the-tanco-paradox?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Great analysis and informative too.
There is a new international organization being established in Canada called the global defence bank. It is set to represent the 5% defence spending of national GDP from 20 countries. The list of countries participating will grow.
World finance numbers show the US is spending more servicing debt than on military (it is trying to pass a $1.4 trillion defence (war) budget now, so war spending stays above debt interest for the time being, keep raising the ceiling.
My question to the the World is this:
Should you spend unparalleled wealth (5% of GDP of 20 industrialized Nations) on the last valuable resources easily accessed on the planet, creating machinery you will never use that runs on fossil fuels? Is this a con? A set up? Second part of the question: if you build up this war machine and use it, what will be left of civilization?
Conclusion: the method of manipulation by the Big Oil - has been to create false demand through the naive stupidity of the Trump administration and MAGA, while using the US military and global banking system to support 5% GDP spending on military. The world needs that money better spent on good government, clean infrastructure, health care, education and sound public policy.
The war is not nation against nation, but civilization against the planet. This budget will tip the scale, and while civilization wins the battle it loses the war, so to speak. 🤷♂️
Brother, thank you for the question. It deserved a real answer rather than a quick one, so I sat with it and wrote a full piece in reply. You will find it below.
Your instinct is right. The spending makes no sense, and Orwell saw the structure of it as far back as 1941 — eight years before 1984 — in a signed essay called Shopkeepers at War, written during the Blitz with German bombers literally over his head. He named the surplus problem plainly, and he never stopped working the diagnosis until the day he died. What you wrote to me is the same diagnosis, eighty-five years later, and the fact that it is still the right diagnosis is itself the point.
What I have tried to do in the reply is hold both things at once — that you are right about the madness, and that there is a seam in the current architecture where the work of building the alternative can actually be done. The piece names that seam. It also names what The Vertical Dispatch is for, why I monitor geopolitics in the first place, and what is being built underneath the daily coverage that almost no one is putting on a single page.
Read it when you have time. Share it with one person who would understand what it is pointing at. The construct of society does not shift through institutions alone. It shifts through people like you, asking the right questions, in their own circles and their own words, until the recognition travels far enough to become unavoidable.
Your vigilance is the material the work is built from. Keep it sharp. Keep writing. And know that the letter you sent is already part of the architecture, whether you intended it that way or not.
The full reply is here: [LINK]
Namaste, brother. Welcome to the work.
https://glenroberts911399.substack.com/p/the-long-reply-to-a-right-question?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Absolutely brilliant analysis. Thank you for sharing this. Now how do we get the message out in the public sphere where soundbites and 30 sec videos feed the masses? Carney is a once in a lifetime leader and I am so grateful he chose to step up for all of us. 🇨🇦
Thank you so much, sister — your message made my morning, and I am laughing because you have just asked the question that keeps every long-form writer awake at night. How do we get a Stratum 8 idea into a thirty-second clip? Better yet — if you crack the code, let me know! 😊
Yep - that is what we are witnessing, but take it one step further, because Carney also seems to realize there needs to be more immediate positive public impact as well.
Brilliant analysis and summation.
I'm so jealous of Canada and so embarrassed by the idiocy here in the USA.
NZ'r here. Really envy you for having such a great leader. Hope he can mentor our government
Aussie here - same! We have an extremely timid Centre-Left national govt with a huge mandate, and virtually zero opposition, with some well-meaning Greens and independents. It is frittering away its time, achieving very little, "while Rome burns".
Great read and observing the reactions, I can only come to the same conclusions of short sightedness and lack of vision. Can you do a deep dive on the Lithium mine in MB which is owned by a Chinese company if that's in your wheelhouse?
Thank you for your comment. Here is the copy you asked for. Look in the comment section below and see that the copy was verified and validated by ChatGPT. I write with Claude and develop with Geminin https://www.sophiainitiative.ai/p/the-tanco-paradox?r=1pgr4n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thank you , well articulated - we, the people, have so few examples of politicians in it for the “long game” and I believe Mr Carney is focused on saving the future for our children and I only hope Canadians can hang in there, recognize this and support him too
Nothing matters. Nothing matters because 18 months ago, climate scientists, people Carney used to quote, told us it was over, that our greed and insouciance and taken us over the climate tipping point. Very few journalists reported on their findings because catastrophe only sells if it’s someone else’s. And the first thing Carney did was repeal the carbon tax and support more pipelines.
But, sure. He’s a financial wizard. Money has just never been my benchmark.
Thank you for the comment. I do not agree with your assessment, but that is what social platforms allow. The world is getting smaller and more complex each day, and the copy has been well received. May I recommend one of my first copies https://glenroberts911399.substack.com/p/special-report-the-carney-smith-paradox?r=1pgr4n&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Thanks. I will continue to monitor policy. IMO, Carney remains the best person to deal with America under Trump. God knows, PP would have been disastrous. As for the future, I hope you are right and I am wrong.
Thank you for that, sister. The grace in your closing line — I hope you are right and I am wrong — is the posture I wish more readers brought to questions like these, and I want to honour it by being honest with you about what I actually think.
You have framed it as right and wrong, and I would gently push back on that framing — not to score a point, but because I do not think anyone who is being honest can claim to know the future well enough to be right or wrong about it in advance. Heraclitus said it twenty-five hundred years ago and it has not stopped being true since: πάντα ῥεῖ — all is change. You cannot step into the same river twice, because by the time your second foot enters, the river is already a different river and you are already a different person. That is not poetic flourish. That is the actual condition under which all of us, including Carney, including the analysts, including you and me, are trying to make sense of what comes next.
So I do not think this is a question of who turns out to be right. I think it is a question of who keeps watching honestly while the river changes — who updates their reading when the evidence shifts, who refuses to let their early position calcify into a creed, who is willing to say I was wrong about that part, and right about this other part, and I do not yet know about the third. That posture is the only one that survives contact with reality over a long enough horizon. It is also, I think, the posture you just demonstrated in your closing line, which is why I am writing this reply with the care I am.
If you want a Canadian example of why long-horizon investment looks reckless in the present and inevitable in retrospect, I would point you to a piece I wrote earlier called The Country That Almost Didn't Get Built: https://www.sophiainitiative.ai/p/the-country-that-almost-didnt-get?r=1pgr4n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
It is on the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s — the project that nearly bankrupted the country, brought down a government in the Pacific Scandal of 1873, survived a no-confidence vote by a margin so thin historians still argue about it, and ended up being the single piece of infrastructure that determined whether Canada existed from sea to sea or stopped at the Manitoba border. The opposition at the time called it reckless. They called it a giveaway. They called it fiscally irresponsible. They were not wrong on the merits. The investment was genuinely risky. The math did not obviously balance.
And the country exists in its current shape today because Macdonald's government made the bet anyway, because the alternative was not fiscal prudence — the alternative was a smaller country, or no country at all. The lesson is not that government investment always works. The lesson is narrower. There is a category of decision where the return cannot be captured by any private actor, where the time horizon exceeds what the present can evaluate honestly, and where the consequence of not proceeding is permanent foreclosure of possibility. The CPR was that kind of decision. So is what Carney is building now. The judgment of whether he gets it right is one neither of us can render today. The river is still moving.
What I am confident of is that the watching matters. People like you, monitoring policy honestly, holding the long-horizon arguments accountable to the near-term evidence — that is the civic vigilance the architecture actually requires to not become hubris. The work is incomplete without readers who push back, and the next pieces will be sharper because of exchanges like this one. So please keep monitoring. Keep applying the pressure. And if I turn out to be wrong on parts of this, I would rather hear it from a reader who engaged in good faith than discover it in the wreckage years from now.
All is change. The honest watcher is the one who changes with it.
— Namaste, sister
From south of the border: It's amusing (and terrifying) to contrast PM Carney's "Stratum 8" planning horizon with the "Stratum 0.1" span of the U.S. President, who struggles to maintain focus from the beginning of a single sentence until its end.
I invite you to read my Substack on the orange man https://glenroberts911399.substack.com/p/the-weight-of-command-a-childrens?r=1pgr4n&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Very much worth reading. Thank you.