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Before presenting solutions, it is thus critical that we first examine the structure and processes of change. In the previous chapter, we looked at the process of internal transformation, what we might characterize as the move from ignorance to knowledge and from complacent acceptance of the status quo's politics of experience to a skeptical adherence to authenticity.

This inner transformation leads to changes in behavior and action which then cause changes in the community and eventually the nation. Since the private-sector middle class/entrepreneurial class has no positive choice left but to opt out, that inner decision will speed the State's slide into insolvency.

This will enable the eventual emergence of what I term The New State which re-sets the U.S. society to the baseline rights defined by the Constitution--rights summarized in the Declaration of Independence as those to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--and offers negative feedback to the current dominance of Elites.

We have already described several models of change.

1. Cycles of price, debt accumulation and renunciation that model long-term periods of stability and instability in economies and societies.

2. Depletion, which triggers technological transformation (development of alternative sources) or social instability as populations fall or move away.

3. Devolution as systemic challenges are masked but not resolved.

4. Over-reach, vulnerability and collapse--phase shifts, power laws, self-organized criticalities (SOC) and the stick/slip hypothesis.

5. The Pareto Principle: the "vital few" can influence the "trivial many."

6. Feedback loops (adding a new feedback introduces change).

These models share a systems analysis perspective. Societies collapse when energy inputs are no longer sufficient to support their infrastructure, as societies fail complexity decreases, and so on. Though insightful on many levels, this systems approach fails to account for the experience of change. To those living through a period of rapid, confusing, even chaotic change, a systems analysis does not illuminate their lived experience nor contribute to their decision-making process as individuals and households.

This is why I approached the structure of change from the experiential Process of Internal Transformation. Observations of the real world can trigger changes in our conceptual understanding which manifests in behavioral changes which ultimately lead to fundamental changes in the observable world.

Thus internal changes are structurally integral to any understanding of the process of change.

At a conceptual level, standard economic and political theories have virtually nothing meaningful or predictive to say about the structure of change:

1. Mainstream economists (academics, think-tankers, State functionaries, et al.) almost universally ignore the fact that the economy is dependent on a real world of dirt, rain, oil, trees, bees, seas, etc. and thus all their metrics (GDP, inventory, EBITA, and so on) are essentially superficial and ontologically (that is, inherently) misleading quantitative traps.

Thus the discussion is on "growth" as if that has nothing to do with energy/soil/water depletion, shifting climate trends, bacterial resistance to drugs, demographics, etc.

2. The entire field of modern economics has evolved in the eyeblink of recorded human history in which fossil fuels were cheap and abundant and advances in health and agriculture enabled a stupendous explosion of the human population. It is as if a field of social study was developed in a brief century or two of Rome's glory years and then held up as universally accurate for all time, even as the Roman Empire imploded.

As the era which seemed permanent to those living in it changes, then their "social science" is suddenly revealed as an absurdly short-sighted and limited byproduct of a unique time. Thus we can anticipate the "death of modern economics" as the underlying assumptions on which the field is grounded change dramatically.

3. In a similar fashion,