Spiritual IT: How Prophets Diagnosed Civilizational Network Failure Before It Happened
Prophets aren’t so much mystical as they are observant….
Hollywood’s collapse as Microcosm
The studio doesn’t collapse all at once.
At first, it looks better than ever. The lobby gleams. The posters are bigger. The trailers are louder. Quarterly earnings calls sound confident, rehearsed, almost smug. Every hallway is filled with screens playing proof that the machine still works.
But something subtle has shifted. The people who built the place feel it before anyone else does.
They’re the ones who remember when the work mattered more than the meeting. When risk was a feature, not a liability. When story came before scale. When the goal wasn’t growth for its own sake, but something closer to awe.
They try to say it out loud. Not dramatically. Not angrily. Just plainly.
“This isn’t why people loved us.”
“This won’t age well.”
“We’re mistaking volume for value.”
They aren’t prophets because they predict doom. They’re prophets because they remember what made the system alive.
And like prophets in every era... No one listens to them.
How High-Quality Systems Get Hijacked
High-quality systems are uniquely vulnerable to narcissistic extraction.
Not because they’re weak. Because they’re rich.
They have brand equity. Cultural trust. Institutional memory. A backlog of goodwill that can be spent without immediate consequence. That surplus attracts a certain kind of operator.
They don’t build. They don’t steward. They extract.
At first, they’re welcomed. They speak fluently about growth. They promise scale. They understand optics. They reassure investors. They reduce uncertainty by reducing ambition.
They replace judgment with metrics. They replace taste with safety. They replace stewardship with process.
They don’t destroy the system. They optimize it.
That’s how the hijack happens.
The Blockbuster Era and the Monoculture Trap
The blockbuster era feels like the peak.
Big openings. Bigger marketing spends. Global rollouts. Everything engineered to be impossible to ignore. Success becomes something you can graph.
But blockbusters are a monoculture.
They consume attention, capital, risk tolerance, and creative bandwidth. Soon, everything must justify itself against the largest possible return.
Smaller films stop getting made. Mid-budget films vanish. Original voices are told to “prove it first.”
The ecosystem collapses inward. What once functioned like a rainforest becomes a single crop field.
It looks productive. Right up until the soil dies.
When Process Replaces Purpose
As the work hollows out, something else grows.
Process.
Greenlights multiply. Committees form. Notes expand. Feedback loops stretch so long they snap. Every decision needs alignment, sign-off, legal review, brand review, market review.
No one is empowered anymore. Everyone is protected. It is death by a thousand cuts.
Meetings become defensive rituals. Language becomes sanitized. Disagreement is framed as negativity. Memory becomes inconvenient.
The people who still remember what excellence feels like are now labeled difficult. They don’t fit the culture. So they leave. Or worse, they stay and go quiet.
That’s when the prophets disappear.
Quiet Disengagement: The Moment the System Actually Dies
From the outside, nothing looks wrong. From the inside, no one is really there anymore.
Talented people keep the job for the money. They pitch what they know will be approved. They save their real ideas for something else.
Everyone tells everyone what they want to hear and this is the moment the system actually dies.
Not when revenue dips. Not when headlines turn.
It dies when belief leaves the building.
The Brush Piles Up
While executives debate IP strategy and brand extensions, the mundane work stops getting done. Maintenance is deferred. Infrastructure decays. Institutional knowledge evaporates.
The people who would normally notice small problems aren’t paying attention anymore. Why would they be? No one listens.
Warnings sound annoying. Edge cases get ignored.
Everything feels managed, right up until it isn’t, and the brush piles up quietly.
Fire Season
When the fire finally comes, everyone acts surprised.
They blame the market.
They blame audiences.
They blame technology.
They blame politics.
They never blame incentives. The truth is simpler.
A system optimized for extraction will always eat itself. A system that punishes truth will always lose reality. A system that replaces stewardship with narcissism cannot hold a center.
By the time the flames are visible, the outcome has been locked in for years.
The prophets didn’t fail.
They were ignored on schedule.
Pull Back: This Was Never Just Hollywood
Hollywood is not the story. It’s the canary. Silicon Valley followed the same arc.
The focus shifted from delivering extraordinary products to extracting value through subscription traps, engagement loops, and financial engineering. SaaS models optimized for recurring revenue replaced craftsmanship optimized for delight.
Engineers who cared about the product warned that incentives were warping behavior. They were told they didn’t understand the business.
They left.
Governments followed the same arc.
Policy became theater. Governance became scoring points. Truth became partisan. Long-term stewardship was sacrificed for short-term advantage. Civil servants who understood the machinery warned that institutions were being hollowed out. They were labeled obstructive or disloyal.
They left.
Different domains. Same mechanics.
Prophets as Spiritual IT
Across history, prophets appear at the same moment in civilizational life cycles. Not during growth, and not after collapse, but during late-stage stability, when things still look fine on the surface. What they actually do looks far less like mysticism and far more like systems diagnostics.
They notice when:
truth no longer travels upward
competence is punished
incentives reward optics over function
extraction exceeds replenishment
people say what leaders want to hear instead of what’s real
They aren’t predicting the future. They’re reading the system state. They’re error logs made human. Systems don’t like error logs.
Why Prophets Are Always Chased Out
Prophets are rarely welcomed in their own institutions because they threaten legitimacy. They don’t attack from the outside. They emerge from within, speaking the language of the system, understanding its logic, and pointing out the flaw no one wants named.
They make denial impossible.
So they’re dismissed as negative. Unaligned. Not a culture fit. History repeats this pattern with boring consistency.
The diagnosis is delivered. The incentives remain unchanged.
Collapse follows.
The Spiritual Diagnosis of Now
Here is the diagnosis, stated plainly. We live in an era where many institutions:
openly reward extraction
filter feedback
select against competence
confuse compliance with legitimacy
treat truth as a threat
The consequences of those choices are no longer abstract. They are visible everywhere you look.
Collapse is not fate. It’s what happens after the people who tell the truth are chased out.
The Final Shot
There are prophets everywhere around you.
They’re not wearing robes. They’re not predicting dates. They’re not speaking in riddles.
They’re the ones quietly explaining why the system no longer works. They’re the ones pointing at the incentives. They’re the ones saying, “This will not hold.”
They’re being ignored. They’re being sidelined. They’re being chased out of boardrooms and governments.
Collapse is what follows that. Not because the future is mysterious, but because once a system stops listening, the ending becomes predictable.
If you want to know more about how we got into this mess… from a spiritual perspective… I wrote some BOOKS about it.
