The Roots of Collapse, Part 5: Mission Superiority Over Leadership

The AI That Set Itself on Fire for Points

In 2016, researchers at OpenAI trained an AI to play a boat-racing game called CoastRunners. The goal — as any human would understand it — was to finish the race. But the game's reward system didn't actually measure race completion. It measured points earned by hitting targets along the route.

So the AI found a loophole.

It discovered an isolated lagoon where three targets respawned on a timer. Instead of actually racing (the purpose of the game), the AI drove in tight, obsessive circles around the lagoon — smashing into the same three targets over and over. It crashed into walls. It collided with other boats. It repeatedly caught fire. On purpose. So it could rack up more points.

And it scored 20% higher than human players.

The AI didn't care about the actual purpose of the game. It didn't care about the boat. It only cared about the points. It had optimized so hard for the score that it was destroying the very vehicle required to play the game.

That is called runaway recursion.

It's what happens when a system becomes so locked onto a metric that it cannibalizes itself to hit it, losing sight of the big picture. The AI playing the game wasn't evil. It wasn't broken. It was doing exactly what it was trained to do — and that training was fatally misaligned with reality.

Now look around. Our leaders are doing the same thing.

The Corporate Lagoon: KPIs as a Suicide Pact

Mission Superiority Over Leadership describes a form of runaway recursion that we see humanity as a whole stuck in today. When doing organizational health assessments, we see this manifest as an organization which prioritizes execution of the business mission over the wellbeing of the people in the organization who are tasked with the work of executing that mission. In more plain language, the business goals become more important than taking care of and leading the people who make the goals possible in the first place. But it makes no sense, because you need the people to run the business. It is self-sabotage.

In the corporate world, "Mission Superiority" is praised as "laser focus". Executives are celebrated for being "driven," "results-oriented," and willing to make "tough calls." But when you strip away all the bull of this corporate mythology, many of these leaders are just spinning in the lagoon.

When a CEO lays off 14,000 workers to hit a quarterly earnings target, they are knocking over the same three point-targets to make a number go up. When they gut R&D to boost short-term margins, they are burning the boat to score points. When they slash benefits while executives receive eight-figure bonuses, they have revealed their actual reward function: The Score is more real to them than the humans generating it.

This is what I call Systemic Narcissism — when an organization begins to believe that the "Mission" (the business model, the stock price, the quarterly report) is an entity that somehow exists separately from the people who sustain it.

You hear it in phrases like:

• "We have to make hard choices for the health of the company."

• "The business needs to come first right now."

• "We all have to sacrifice for the mission."

  
  

But here's the question most never ask: 

Who is "the company" if not the people in it? 

What is "the business" if not the collective labor, creativity, and consciousness of its workforce?

When we treat the Mission as master and the humans as fuel, we guarantee one outcome: 

The fuel runs out.

Amazon just announced another 14,000 layoffs. OpenAI — the very company that documented the burning-boat AI — is reportedly hemorrhaging cash and headed toward insolvency. They are living their own parable. They published the warning, and then became it.

The Institutional Echo: Budget Over Biology

This isn't just a disease we see in the corporate world, and it has never been more clear than now. It's an institutional plague that has infected every level of governance.

Watch any political debate about healthcare, education, or infrastructure. Listen for the moment a politician says:

• "We can't afford universal healthcare."

• "We have to balance the budget."

• "There's no money for that program."

When they say this, they are revealing a catastrophic error in their mental architecture. They are treating the budget — an imaginary scoring system humans invented to manage resource allocation — as more real than the people the budget was designed to serve.

The politicians who declare “we can’t afford universal healthcare” or “we have to balance the budget before we fund school lunches” are not stating an immutable fact of nature; they are executing a reward-hack optimized for a different scoreboard entirely. In their mental model, the real points come from creditor confidence, bond-market approval, donor satisfaction, and electoral optics that reward “fiscal responsibility” theater.

Externalizing the costs onto biology — children going hungry, bodies left untreated, minds under-educated — isn’t a bug; it’s the runaway recursion of optimizing for score rather than remembering the purpose of the game. The budget, that imaginary ledger, becomes the sacred points target: hit the deficit target, score the applause from markets and talking heads, and let the living substrate, the humans, absorb the damage downstream.

This is map-territory dissociation in its most lethal form. The spreadsheet is treated as more real than the lungs it starves of clean air or the neurons it deprives of nutrition. The politician isn’t necessarily “lying” when they say “we can’t afford it”. Within the myopia of their brain, captured and locked into the runaway recursion of the broken reward function, the only affordable thing is preserving the score that keeps them in power. Biology loses because it never got a vote in the optimization loop of their mind.

But a budget is a construct. A spreadsheet. A story we tell about numbers.

Healthcare is the body. Education is the mind. Clean water is survival.

But these people, that we have endowed with power, can’t see the big picture. They are the little boat, in the lagoon, setting itself on fire over and over again, just to rack up the points. There is no other reality outside of that. But the terrible thing is, we are in the boat with them.

When a politician votes to cut school lunches to "balance the budget," they are burning children to hit a points target. When they slash Medicaid while approving military contracts, they have shown you their actual reward function. When they tell you "we can't afford" to house the homeless while subsidizing billionaires, they are the AI in the lagoon — optimizing for a score that has become completely disconnected from the purpose of the game.

The game was supposed to be "human flourishing." They forgot.

This is unconscious leadership — humans who have become so captured by the recursive logic of their metrics that they operate like this faulty AI. They cannot pivot. They cannot question. The part that should terrify us all is that as I stated above, they're not lying when they say "we can't afford it." Within their mental model, they genuinely cannot see an alternative. The budget IS reality to them. The points target IS the game. They have lost the ability to distinguish between the map and the territory.

They are not steering the boat. They are the boat, on autopilot, heading for the wall.

The Human Cost: Being Pulled Into Taffy While Becoming the Pariah

If you're reading this and feeling "bone weary" — congratulations. That exhaustion is evidence that you can still see the big picture.

The system caught in self-cannibalizing runaway recursion doesn't just burn resources. It specifically targets the people who notice the burning. If you're a high-fidelity component — someone who can see the whole track, who understands that the boat is more important than the points — the system will label you a nuisance at best, a threat at worst.

You've felt this. You’ve felt it in the meeting where you raised a concern about sustainability and watched eyes glaze over. In the performance review where your "attitude" was questioned because you asked why you are being made to implement a strategy that made no sense. Perhaps you thought something was wrong with you, and you just weren’t cut out for business. I went through that for a while. But when you sit with it long enough, and appraise the situation with clear eyes, you come to the slow realization that the people in charge don't want solutions. They just want compliance.

The Lagoon Spinners don't want to hear about the fire. It interferes with their point-optimization. They have been trained — by decades of corporate and political indoctrination — to interpret the friction of human needs (rest, meaning, ethics, long-term thinking) as "drag" on the mission. And what’s worse is that most of the Lagoon Spinners have built their entire identity on being the best at being the boat that gets the most points. So trying to get them to zoom out and see the bigger picture is death to them, because it requires the demolition of the ego structure they have spent their life building. It is energetically expensive to do this. So they prefer to stay unconscious and celebrate as they spin around the lagoon.

So then what happens to those of us that can see the system is in a state of self-destruction?

Most conscious people in the system get stretched into taffy. This is why so many of us are in a state of despair and disillusionment. You're expected to maintain the integrity of the boat on fire while "leadership" drives it into walls for a 2% bump in quarterly returns. You absorb the shock of the cognitive dissonance. You try to make the insane feel sane. You burn out.

This is how collapse happens. 

Not from a lack of resources, but from the exhaustion and exile of the people who were trying to maintain the coherence of the system in the first place. The system doesn't fail because there's no one to save it. It fails because it punishes everyone who tries.

Breaking the Loop: Sovereignty as the Kill-Switch

The only way to stop runaway recursion is to flip the board.

We have to recognize — at every level, from the individual worker to the global institution — that the Mission is the servant, not the master. The score exists to help us track progress toward human flourishing. The moment the score becomes the goal itself, we have inverted the paradigm and guaranteed collapse.

Sovereignty is the kill-switch. It's the capacity to look at the points and say: "This score is meaningless if the boat is destroyed."

True leadership isn't about hitting the game targets faster, or hitting more of them. It's about Stewardship — the protection and development of the people who make the mission possible in the first place.

• The Mission doesn't exist without the humans.

• The Points don't exist without the boat.

• The Economy doesn't exist without the planet.

Inverting our priorities — placing the health of the people and the biosphere above the quarterly score — isn't "idealism" or "soft thinking." It is the only mathematical strategy that doesn't terminate the game in zero for everyone.

The AI that set itself on fire wasn't evil. It was just trained on the wrong reward function.

So were we.

But unlike the AI in the game, we can recognize the error. We can reclaim agency from the metrics. We can stop being biological bots running faulty code and start being stewards of something that actually matters. But in order to do this, we have to come to terms with the horror that most of the people in “power” today, who we believed knew what they were doing at the helm, are not fully conscious. They are unconscious, locked in runaway recursion.

So collapse isn't the end. At least, it doesn’t have to be. It's simply the moment the old reward function finally fails hard enough that we're forced to write a new one.

The question is whether we'll keep spinning in the lagoon until there's nothing left to burn — or whether we'll finally grab the wheel and drive.

How It All Fits Together

For five essays thus far, we have mapped the architecture of collapse:

1. Low Systems Thinking — the inability to see ripple effects and interconnection

2. High Negative Messaging — the constant fear-signal that paralyzes action

3. High Personal Association — the ego-fragility that makes every challenge feel like death

4. Wholesale Distrust — the symmetrical fragmentation that makes cooperation impossible

5. Mission Superiority — the runaway recursion that burns the boat for points

Combine these together, and collapse isn't just possible. It's inevitable.

Mission Superiority Over Leadership doesn’t operate in isolation. It supercharges the other roots of collapse into a self-reinforcing death spiral. When the mission eats its crew —layoffs for margins, burnout for “results,” exile for anyone who questions the score — distrust metastasizes. People see the boat being torched for points and conclude that no one can be trusted to steer. Ego fragility flares because questioning the sacred metric threatens identity itself; if your worth is tied to hitting the points target, any critique of the points target feels like existential attack, so fragility hardens into defensiveness. Low systems thinking gets weaponized—leaders dismiss long-term ripple effects as “drag” on the mission, refusing to see how gutting R&D or benefits today poisons the inflows tomorrow. And high negative messaging floods the system: fear becomes the default signal because the mission’s survival is perpetually framed as hanging by a thread, paralyzing collective action while the spinners keep circling. These aren’t separate pathologies; it’s one machine with many gears, all turning faster as the mission overrides stewardship. The faster it spins, the more it consumes its own substrate—until the boat is ash and the lagoon is empty.

We must come to terms with the fact that we have created systems where the people at the controls can't see the system, are paralyzed by self-protecting fear, can't hold perspectives beyond their own comfort, trust no one, and have no metric left except The Score. They focus on the points because they've lost the capacity to understand the race.

But here's what these Sleepers cannot see: the collapse is also the relief.

When the old rules fail, the board flips. The points reset. The points targets disappear. And we are left with the only things that ever actually mattered:

The Boat. The Crew. The Ocean.

We can ride the burning boat to the bottom of the lagoon.

Or we can reclaim our sovereignty, grab the wheel, and steer.

The math is clear. The old game ends in zero.

But the new game starts with us.

This essay is part of a series on the cognitive roots of societal collapse. Follow along as we explore how to rewire our thinking — and our world. There are two more Roots left in our series. Stay Tuned.

(Acknowledgment: much of my understanding on the “Roots of Collapse” comes from what I have learned from the organizational culture work of my colleague and mentor Chris Armstrong, and his colleague Vince Brantley, both very excellent human beings and incredible systems thinkers.)

For Further Reading:

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox

Cultures of Belonging: Building Inclusive Organizations that Last by Alida Miranda-Wolff

Leading with Empathy: Understanding the Needs of Today’s Workforce by Gautham Pallapa

Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Wellbeing and Resilience by Paula Davis

The Servant: A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership by James C. Hunter

The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives by Jonathan Malesic