Preparing for the Collapse of the Global Western Empire, but with Hope

The end of the system is not the end of reality. It is the end of a way of running the world. And it is a system that needs to die anyway, because it is killing us. We can build something better, for everyone.

I spent all of 2025 mapping the collapse of the Western global empire. The system is a snake eating its own tail, and it has finally run out of snake to eat.

The good news is, we don’t have to go down with it. 

We just have to survive the transition. 

But survival requires us to shift our own mindset, and envision something different. Better. For everyone.

“Starsong (Remember)” is the story of Awakening. It is the “frequency” of this leap. https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/elizabethhalligan/starsong

I didn’t write this song as entertainment. It is all of my work, told in a musical format that is perhaps more accessible to most people. Accessibility is important to me. I don’t have formal music training, unless you count 5 years of school band I barely remember, so don’t expect studio-level production. It’s just me, raw vocals, and a Røde PodMic telling a story. I don’t like autotune because it feels like it tunes out the soul. 

So it ain’t perfect. But it’s real.

The Biology Driving Collapse:

We are in The Upside Down.

We’ve had evolution backwards for 100 years. The Modern Synthesis is incomplete and makes no room for human agency.The human brain is failing to evolve out of amygdala dominance and into full hemispheric integration.This is the evolutionary bottleneck of Homo sapiens, and the cause of repeated cycles of civilizational collapse.

Link to read Collapse Wasn’t Inevitable, We Locked Ourselves Out of Evolution

The Ontology of Physics Driving the Collapse:

Our systems are built on a model of reality that is antithetical to actual physics. 

Matter is not primary. 

Frequency (energy) is.

Both Einstein and Compton’s math already show this. Modern physics’ current ontology (interpretation of the story the math tells) is based on an exploitative, entropic model of reality that Western science NEEDS to justify empires that view the planet as a dead rock they can constantly extract from.

If you read this essay when I first posted it in September, I have expanded it significantly. It is not the same essay it was then, and it is worth revisiting.

Link to read Mass is a Standing Wave & Energy is Frequency

The Psychology Driving Collapse:

The humans currently in power/the very “wealthy” are the most amygdala-dominant, and they are caught in the very runaway recursion they fear AI will get stuck in and destroy humanity with.

Their fear of AI destroying humanity in runaway recursion is the projection of their own id, their limbic brain without a base case for ever feeling like they have enough.

Link to read Humanity’s Big AI Fear Is Runaway Recursion — But We’re Already Caught In That Loop

The first two essays above are long, so if you want to start with shorter essays introducing these concepts in a more digestible format, my Medium profile has other posts that will do that for you, helping you work up to the longer root cause analyses.It is still a lot to digest, but we are running out of time to ignore the feedback loop.

Elizabeth Halligan — Medium

The Main Takeaway

Systems are nonlinear. 

They are circulation systems.

But those in power treat them like a pyramid. When they do this, extracting, exploiting, and hoarding, they act like a clot or stroke in the circulation system. When they do this, they create the conditions in which the host dies.

We prop up the extraction machine in fear, not seeing failure to envision something different is simply due to lack of love, and imagination. When systems fail, it is because we failed to integrate the feedback of the system itself. 

But we are out of time. We can’t ignore the feedback anymore.

We have to wake up. We have to choose to remember.