The Faust Baseline™Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org
There was a time when change came fast and loud.
You could feel it building. You could point to a moment when the air shifted and say, there—it’s happening.
That kind of change used to arrive like weather.
A front moved in. Pressure built. Something finally broke.
That doesn’t happen anymore.
Not because people stopped caring.
Not because injustice vanished.
Not because power suddenly became kinder.
It stopped because the system learned how to survive storms.
Storms require something we no longer have
A storm needs a center.
A place where pressure can collect.
In the past, power sat in visible towers:
a king, a factory owner, a ruling party, a single institution you could name.
You could point.
You could aim.
You could push hard enough in one direction and something would give.
Today, power is spread out on purpose.
It lives in:
procedures instead of people,
contracts instead of commitments,
software instead of offices,
committees instead of leaders.
You can knock down one structure and nothing stops.
There is no single door to kick in anymore.
Storms don’t work when there’s nothing solid to hit.
Pressure no longer accumulates — it leaks
Storms don’t come from anger alone.
They come from contained pressure.
Modern systems are built to prevent that containment.
Outrage gets vented constantly:
online, daily, hourly, endlessly.
Each release feels like action.
Each release actually weakens the buildup.
By the time something truly matters, people are already exhausted.
Nothing has time to mature.
Nothing has time to harden into resolve.
Pressure is bled off in advance, the way dams release water so they never burst.
Fragmentation replaced unity
Storms require alignment.
Not agreement on everything — just agreement on what matters most.
Today, people are divided into ever-smaller slices:
interests,
identities,
tribes,
feeds.
Each group experiences a different reality.
Each one thinks it’s alone.
Each one believes the others are the enemy.
Anger no longer moves upward.
It moves sideways.
Neighbor against neighbor.
Worker against worker.
Citizen against citizen.
Power doesn’t need to suppress unity anymore.
It just needs to keep people arguing with each other.
Comfort dulls the edge just enough
Historically, storms followed real deprivation.
Hunger.
Cold.
Clear injustice with no escape.
Today, most people are not starving.
They are strained.
They are tired.
They are anxious.
They are uneasy.
But they are still entertained.
Still fed.
Still housed.
Still scrolling.
Comfort doesn’t have to be good to be effective.
It just has to be adequate.
Enough comfort delays action.
Enough distraction postpones consequence.
Enough convenience keeps people hoping things will fix themselves.
Storms don’t form in rooms with air conditioning and Wi-Fi.
Language has been broken on purpose
Big change once relied on shared words.
Words meant the same thing to everyone:
truth,
fairness,
responsibility,
freedom.
Now language is unstable.
Every word is contested.
Every meaning is negotiable.
Every sentence turns into an argument about definitions.
When language collapses, coordination becomes impossible.
You can’t organize a storm if no one agrees on what’s happening,
who’s responsible,
or what “fixed” would even mean.
Confusion is not a side effect.
It’s the control mechanism.
The system learned to perform reform
The most effective storm prevention is not force.
It’s just enough concession.
A policy tweak.
A task force.
A new slogan.
A symbolic gesture.
Something that looks like movement.
Something that sounds like progress.
Enough to calm the room.
Enough to reset the clock.
Storm energy evaporates the moment people believe, “They’re working on it.”
Nothing has to change.
Time just has to pass.
The deeper reason storms fail now
Storms come from moral clarity.
Not outrage.
Not volume.
Clarity.
They come when people quietly agree:
This is wrong. It cannot continue. And we will not adapt to it.
What prevents storms today is not oppression.
It’s fog.
Too much noise.
Too many explanations.
Too many options.
Too many ways to look away.
What replaces storms instead
This doesn’t mean change is impossible.
It means it comes differently now.
Not as explosions.
As erosion.
Not as revolutions.
As standards.
Not as mobs.
As refusal.
Change now happens when people:
withdraw consent quietly,
build parallel systems patiently,
hold lines without shouting,
choose competence over convenience,
and stop participating in what degrades them.
It’s slower.
Less dramatic.
Harder to see.
And much harder to stop.
Storms break things fast.
They also leave rubble.
What’s forming now is slower than a storm —
and stronger.
Like roots pushing through concrete.
You don’t hear them.
You don’t see them.
Until one day the surface cracks —
and there’s no fixing it back the way it was.
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