The Alchemist's Dilemma: Holding Power Lightly in the Transition

Part 1: Recognition, Opening, and Core Framework

Recognition: Who Gets to Have This Conversation

I need to start with an uncomfortable truth: even having this conversation is a privilege.

If you’re reading this and thinking about how to ethically deploy surplus capital, you’re already operating from a position most humans will never reach. You have enough to eat. You have shelter. You have the cognitive bandwidth to worry about whether your money is “clean.” That’s not universal—it’s exceptional.

I write this from Sweden, on social assistance for depression, having lost everything I’d accumulated in my thirties to a binary trading scam that vanished overnight. For two years after that, I lived with literally no money at all. I learned what it means to be held by community, to receive without being able to reciprocate, to watch the world continue spinning while you have no lever to move it with.

And yet, even now, even on state support, I have more material security than most humans who have ever lived. I have healthcare. I have internet. I have time to write frameworks for regenerative futures instead of scrambling for survival. The fact that I’m thinking about these questions means I’m already operating from a position of relative safety.

So this piece isn’t written from a mountaintop. It’s written from the muddle. From someone who has been both reckless with capital (gambling it on markets I didn’t understand) and completely without it (surviving on foraged food and society’s waste streams). From someone who has felt the paralysis of wanting to do good while suspecting that any engagement with money might compromise that desire.

I am not a successful entrepreneur who has built a regenerative empire. I am not a financial advisor. I am a systems thinker who has failed with money, been destroyed by its absence, and now studies the patterns of how it moves—and paralyzes—those who want to build a better world.

What I do have is a sense for the wrongness of the world and years spent thinking about how to make it better—building frameworks like the Global Governance Frameworks and studying systems thinking through projects like Spiralize. I’m not someone who has built movements or managed large-scale resources. I’m someone who has sat with the questions long enough to see patterns in how others get stuck.

The people who need this most are the ones I don’t know yet: the inheritors wracked with guilt, the entrepreneurs building regenerative businesses who fear they’re becoming what they hate, the burned-out activists who dream of rest but think accepting money would be betrayal. If that’s you, know that I’m not writing as someone who has figured it out. I’m writing as someone still figuring it out—offering a protocol I wish I’d had before I made my mistakes.

And here’s the thing: because I have no “Stock” to protect, I have no incentive to lie to you about how dangerous it is. I am not trying to preserve a dynasty; I am trying to build a future. My lack of wealth is not a credential of moral superiority—it’s a position of strategic clarity.

The privilege isn’t having money. The privilege is having the safety to think clearly about it.

Let’s use that privilege wisely.

Opening Story: The $650k Inheritance

This story happens more often than you’d think, always in whispers, always with the same cocktail of guilt, paralysis, and desperate pragmatism.

Someone—let’s call her Kara—receives word that a distant relative has died and left her $650,000. She works on land rematriation. She spends her days arguing that property theft can never be legitimized. And now she’s inheriting the proceeds of exactly that system.

She has forty-eight hours to make decisions before the lawyers finalize the trust. The questions spiral: “Am I allowed to keep any of this? If I keep even ten percent, am I complicit? But if I give it all away immediately, I’ll still be on food stamps next year and right back where I was—watching someone else make decisions about that land I was trying to protect.”

This pattern repeats across the regenerative movement. The regenerative movement has matured to the point where some people are starting to accumulate resources—through inheritance, through businesses that unexpectedly succeed, through the chaotic redistribution happening as late-stage capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis. And there’s no shared ethical operating system for it.

Meanwhile, BlackRock is buying up farmland at a record pace. Private equity is swallowing community institutions. The people with no compunctions about wealth are moving fast, and the people with the most consciousness about it are frozen.

In Kara’s case—or in the many similar cases that keep emerging—the usual outcome is paralysis. Three months of agonizing indecision during which opportunities vanish. That land plot gets sold to a developer. That organizing network collapses for lack of funding. That legal defense fund never materializes when the state comes after community leaders.

Can you touch money without being poisoned by it?

This manifesto argues: Yes. But only if you treat it as a river or a lightning strike—never as a vault. Only if you build accountability structures that don’t rely on your own virtue. Only if you’re willing to name your failures publicly and submit to correction.

We need an ethical operating system for conscious capital. Not one that celebrates wealth or pretends it’s neutral. One that acknowledges the poison and provides the antidote: protocols for transmutation, accountability, and ultimately, composting everything back into soil.

The Alchemist and the Compost Heap

Let me be clear about the work we’re actually doing here.

We are not celebrating wealth. We are not “building conscious capitalism” or any such nonsense. The system that generates surplus capital is fundamentally extractive—built on stolen land, stolen labor, stolen futures. There is no “clean” money in late-stage capitalism. Every dollar is haunted.

So why touch it at all?

Because refusing to touch the poison doesn’t make it go away. It just means the poison stays in the hands of people who will use it to extract even more. Unilateral disarmament doesn’t stop the war; it just guarantees you lose.

The metaphor I keep returning to is this: We are reluctant alchemists. Alchemy was the ancient art of transmutation—turning lead into gold, poison into medicine. It was dangerous work. The alchemist had to handle toxic substances, knowing that one mistake could kill them. But the goal was never to hoard the gold. The goal was to produce the medicine the world needed.

But let’s be precise about what financial alchemy actually is: It is the power to force the physical world to obey an abstract command. It is the power to turn a forest into a parking lot—or a parking lot back into a forest—with a signature. Money isn’t neutral; it’s coercive. Every dollar represents the accumulated capacity to compel reality to bend to your will, whether that will is extractive or regenerative.

In our case, we handle fiat currency (the lead), use extractive legal tools like property law (the crucible), and temporarily produce forms of power the old system recognizes—legal title, bank balances, market leverage. We are using violence-coded instruments. But we do this only so we can create the protected conditions for the slower, humbler, more essential work: composting.

Composting is what happens after alchemy. You take the dead, depleted matter—the autumn leaves, the food scraps, the systems that have exhausted themselves—and you create the conditions for microbial transformation. You let it break down. You aerate it, turn it, wait. And eventually, it becomes soil. Rich, living, regenerative soil from which new growth emerges.

The gold is never the point. The soil is.

We practice financial alchemy only to get resources out of the extractive system and into the conditions where they can decompose into community land trusts, mutual aid networks, ecological restoration projects, movements for liberation. Into living systems that can regenerate themselves without requiring our constant intervention.

This is the work. Not accumulation. Not even “conscious wealth.” Transmutation and composting. Turning toxic capital into the substrate for regenerative futures, then stepping back and letting the microbial commons do its work.

And here’s the terrifying part: the alchemist is always at risk of being poisoned by their own work. The substances you handle will seep into your skin, change your nervous system, reorient your loyalties. You start handling money to build the movement, and six months later you find yourself making decisions to protect the money instead of advance the mission.

This isn’t theoretical speculation. This pattern emerges consistently in regenerative projects that start to accumulate resources. The founders who were once fierce advocates become cautious managers. The collectives that were once open become defensive about their assets. The poison is real, even when the intentions are pure.

That’s why we need protocols. Not virtue. Not good intentions. Actual, enforceable, community-accountable protocols that catch this drift before it becomes capture, that force corrective action before the alchemist becomes the dragon.

The rest of this manifesto is that protocol.

1. The Paralysis of Purity: The Saint’s Trap

Before we get to what to do, we need to understand the trap that stops most conscious people from doing anything at all.

I call it the Saint’s Trap, though you might know it as the Paralysis of Purity, the Green Shadow, or simply “activist guilt.” It’s the belief—often unconscious—that the most moral position is to refuse all engagement with power systems, including money.

The logic goes like this:

Money under capitalism is inherently dirty (true)
Accumulating money makes you complicit in the system (partially true)
Therefore, the most ethical stance is to refuse wealth entirely (false conclusion)
Staying poor/precarious keeps your hands clean (comforting but ultimately selfish illusion)

I understand this logic viscerally. I lived it. When I lost all my savings to that binary trading scam and then spent two years with essentially no money, there was a weird sense of moral clarity to it. I wasn’t participating in the machine. I was outside of it, surviving through foraging and dumpster diving in the Basque Country, living in an apartment I still technically owned (but couldn’t pay rent for) and then briefly in an abandoned house.

But here’s what I learned during those two years: my purity wasn’t actually purity—it was just a different form of dependence.

I was living off the waste streams of the very system I claimed to reject. The dumpsters I foraged from were filled by capitalist supply chains. The apartment I squatted in was a property relation I couldn’t afford to maintain but also couldn’t escape. And when I finally needed to return to “society” in Sweden, I had to accept help from my ex-girlfriend and parents—meaning my withdrawal from the system just redistributed the burden to people who cared about me.

My refusal to engage with capital didn’t mean I was free of the system—it just meant I was consuming its margins without being able to contribute to alternatives. And while I was being purely broke, less scrupulous people were buying up the farmland, funding the politicians, building the surveillance infrastructure. My lack of resources didn’t stop the world from getting worse. It just meant I had no leverage to make it better.

My experience taught me that the Saint’s Trap is not just a personal failing, but a systemic one. It plays out like this:

The Saint’s Trap is actually a form of privilege. It’s the luxury of keeping your moral self-image intact while ceding all material power to those with no conscience about using it. It’s unilateral disarmament in a war that doesn’t stop just because you’ve laid down your weapons.

The trap is especially pernicious because it feels like integrity. It feels like you’re taking a stand. But what you’re actually doing is withdrawing from the battlefield while calling it virtue. The land still gets sold. The projects still die for lack of funding. The movements still collapse because organizers burn out without material support.

BlackRock doesn’t have this conversation. Private equity doesn’t agonize over whether wealth is pure. While we’re paralyzed by guilt, they’re moving fast, and every acre we could have protected becomes a data center instead.

The alternative to the Saint’s Trap isn’t becoming them. It’s not celebrating wealth or pretending extraction doesn’t matter. The alternative is strategic complicity—conscious, time-bound, heavily-accountable engagement with power for the explicit purpose of building the conditions where that power becomes obsolete.

We touch the poison, but we have the antidote ready. We handle the money, but we never forget it’s haunted. We use the tools of the old world to build the new one, knowing we’ll need to compost ourselves and our tools when the work is done.

Purity is a trap. Potency is a practice. Let’s learn the practice.

2. The Three States of Capital: Stock, Flow, and Lightning

If we’re going to handle capital consciously, we need to understand its different states and their moral qualities. Not all money does the same thing. How you hold it determines whether it’s generative or extractive, medicine or poison.

Before we go further, let’s name the primary failure mode: The unconscious slide from Lightning (strategic, time-bound accumulation) into Stock (permanent hoarding). Everything that follows—the entire protocol—is designed to detect and correct this slide before it becomes irreversible. This is the dragon we’re building fences against.

I propose three states, each with its own metaphor and ethical status:

Stock: The Stagnant Pool

Stock is wealth held as permanent possession. It sits in accounts “working for you” through compound interest, real estate appreciation, stock dividends. It generates passive income—which is a polite way of saying it extracts value from the labor and land of others without you lifting a finger.

Stock is a pool of standing water. Without flow, it stagnates. It breeds mosquitoes—financial instruments designed to extract ever more from the pool’s surroundings while contributing nothing back. It concentrates. It walls itself off. Eventually, it becomes a moat protecting a castle, and you become someone who has to defend the moat.

This is the engine of wealth inequality. Every dollar held as Stock is a dollar removed from circulation in the real economy, especially the regenerative economy. It’s hoarded potential that never becomes kinetic.

The regenerative position on Stock is simple: It is never ethically permissible to hold capital permanently as Stock. You may pass through this state temporarily (we’ll get to that), but if you’re accumulating Stock as an end goal—whether for retirement security, generational wealth, or “financial freedom”—you are contributing to the extractive system regardless of your stated values.

The compost metaphor helps here: Stock is like sealing organic matter in plastic. It can’t break down. It can’t feed the soil. It just sits there, preserved and inert, taking up space that living systems need.

Flow: The River and the Membrane

Flow is capital in motion. It moves through you like a river through a watershed or like nutrients through a membrane. You receive it, you use it briefly for legitimate needs, and it flows onward—into projects, communities, land trusts, mutual aid networks, living systems.

Flow has velocity. You can measure it: What’s the average “dwell time” of a dollar in your accounts before it’s deployed? A month? A week? A day? The faster the flow, the more generative it becomes. Money in motion does work. Money in stagnation does violence.

Think of yourself as a membrane, not a vault. Membranes are semi-permeable. They let some things through, hold others back temporarily, but their purpose is circulation, not accumulation. Your bank account is ideally more like a checking account than a savings account—a place where money briefly pauses before continuing its journey.

In practice, Flow looks like:

Receiving payment for work, then immediately deploying 40%+ to frontline funds (we’ll formalize this as the “First Fruits Rule” later)
The rest covering your legitimate costs (Sovereign Floor—more on that soon) and funding projects
Operating with a near-zero balance philosophy: money arrives, money departs, you facilitate the exchange

The compost metaphor: Flow is the nitrogen cycle, the water cycle, the nutrient exchange in healthy soil. Matter and energy circulate. Nothing stagnates. Everything feeds everything else.

Lightning: The Focused Strike

But sometimes, Flow isn’t enough. Sometimes you need concentration. Lightning is capital deliberately held for a specific, time-bound, strategic deployment—then released all at once for maximum impact.

This is different from Stock because it has three essential characteristics:

Purpose-specific: You know exactly what it’s for before you accumulate it
Time-bound: It has an expiration date—if you haven’t deployed it by X date, it automatically flows to a pre-committed destination
Single-use: Once released, you return to near-zero, not to accumulation

Lightning looks like:

A legal defense fund for when the state targets a community organizer
Saving for two years to make a single transformative land purchase
Building strike capacity to bail out an entire activist group when they’re hit with a SLAPP suit
Emergency funds to keep a regenerative project alive through a crisis

A concrete example: Lightning is the Hearthstone Protocol in action. You use a massive, sudden concentration of capital to buy a tract of land—not to own it, but solely to remove it from the market forever through a Stewardship Trust. The capital strikes once, changes the legal reality permanently, and then vanishes. You never “owned” the land in any meaningful sense; you were the brief conduit through which it became un-ownable.

The difference between Lightning and Stock is intent, timeline, and discharge. Lightning is a capacitor, not a battery. It charges for a specific purpose, then releases completely. Stock is a reservoir that never intends to empty.

The compost metaphor: Lightning is the breaking of hard ground. Sometimes you need concentrated force to crack through compacted soil so roots can penetrate. But after the lightning strike, the ground softens, rain flows in, and the slow work of decomposition resumes.

The Ethical Hierarchy

In regenerative practice:

Flow is the default state. This is where you should spend 90%+ of your financial life.
Lightning is occasionally necessary. But it requires pre-commitment, accountability structures, and automatic discharge mechanisms.
Stock is never permissible as a permanent condition. You may briefly pass through it (inheriting money before you can deploy it, for example), but if you find yourself building Stock, you have already failed the protocol and need immediate correction.

The work ahead is learning to stay in Flow, use Lightning wisely, and notice immediately when you’re slipping into Stock.

Visual: The Three States

╔════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║  STOCK (Stagnant Pool)                                         ║
║  • Permanent accumulation                                      ║
║  • Generates passive income                                    ║
║  • Creates moats and walls                                     ║
║  • Moral status: EXTRACTIVE                                    ║
║  • Compost equivalent: Sealed in plastic, cannot decompose     ║
╚════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

╔════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║  FLOW (River/Membrane)                                         ║
║  • Money in constant circulation                               ║
║  • High velocity, low dwell time                               ║
║  • Facilitates exchange, doesn't accumulate                    ║
║  • Moral status: REGENERATIVE                                  ║
║  • Compost equivalent: Nutrient cycling in living soil         ║
╚════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

╔════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║  LIGHTNING (Focused Strike)                                    ║
║  • Time-bound, purpose-specific accumulation                   ║
║  • Single-use discharge, then return to zero                   ║
║  • Breaks hard ground for regeneration                         ║
║  • Moral status: STRATEGIC (requires heavy accountability)     ║
║  • Compost equivalent: Breaking compacted soil for aeration    ║
╚════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

3. The Sovereign Floor: How Much Personal Resilience Is Moral

Here’s where theory meets the terror of actual human vulnerability.

We’ve established that Stock is extractive and Flow is regenerative. But this immediately raises the question: What about survival? What about healthcare? What about caring for aging parents, or disabled children, or your own body when it inevitably breaks down?

If we say “keep nothing,” we create martyrs, not movements. Burned-out activists who gave everything and now have nothing are not inspiring—they’re cautionary tales. And more pragmatically, if you can’t maintain your own stability, you become a burden on the very communities you’re trying to support.

So we need a clear line. Not a vague “2-5 years of savings” (what does that even mean in an inflationary collapse?). We need a precise, defensible, calculable number that represents the minimum resilience required to stay in the fight without requiring rescue.

I call this the Sovereign Floor.

Defining the Sovereign Floor

The Sovereign Floor is the minimum capital required to maintain your capacity as an effective agent of change for a realistic planning horizon, accounting for systemic risks beyond your control.

It is not luxury. It is not comfort. It is not freedom from obligation. It is the hard floor beneath which you become a net drain rather than a net contributor.

Here’s how to calculate it:

1. Base Annual Costs (be ruthlessly honest)

Housing (rent/mortgage, property tax, insurance, utilities)
Healthcare (insurance premiums, medications, copays, likely interventions)
Food and basic household needs
Transportation (if required for work/organizing)
Dependent care (children, elders, disabled family members)
Communication/internet (if essential for work)

Don’t include:

Entertainment
Travel
Restaurants
Discretionary purchases
“Quality of life” upgrades

2. Multiply by Planning Horizon

In stable democracies with functional safety nets: 5-10 years
In collapsing systems (US, UK, much of Europe post-2024): 15-25 years
The worse your country’s trajectory, the longer your horizon needs to be

3. Add Specific Vulnerability Buffers

Chronic illness requiring expensive treatment: +30-50%
Caring for aging parents without other family support: +40-60%
Disability that limits earning capacity: +50-100%
Living in areas with high climate risk (fire, flood, heat): +20-30%

4. Inflation-Adjust

Assume 3-5% annual inflation for stable currencies
Assume 8-15% for currencies in terminal decline
This is not paranoia; this is math

5. Result = Your Sovereign Floor

Example calculation for someone in Sweden (relatively stable) with chronic illness:

Base annual costs: 180,000 SEK (~$17,000 USD)
Planning horizon: 10 years
Base floor: 1,800,000 SEK
Chronic illness buffer: +40% = 720,000 SEK
Inflation adjustment at 4%: × 1.48 over 10 years
Sovereign Floor: ~3,700,000 SEK (~$350,000 USD)

Example for someone in the US (collapsing) with two kids:

Base annual costs: $45,000
Planning horizon: 20 years
Base floor: $900,000
Dependent care buffer: +50% = $450,000
Inflation adjustment at 5%: × 2.65 over 20 years
Sovereign Floor: ~$3,600,000 (~$3.6M USD)

Let’s be absolutely clear: These numbers are not an excuse for hoarding $3 million while the world burns. They are a sobering acknowledgment of the brutal mathematics of collapse in countries with failing social safety nets. They illustrate why building collective resilience—community land trusts, mutual aid networks, cooperative healthcare—is the most urgent work of our time.

The higher your personal Floor, the more fragile and isolated you are. The goal is not to justify individual stockpiling. The goal is to lower everyone’s Floor through solidarity infrastructure—making it possible for all of us to survive on less because we’re holding each other up.

Your Sovereign Floor is a measure of your vulnerability, not your virtue. The work is to reduce it by building commons.

These numbers should make you uncomfortable. They’re supposed to. They’re honest accounting of what it actually costs to maintain stability in systems that are actively hostile to human wellbeing.

Rules for the Sovereign Floor

Rule 1: The Floor is ring-fenced. This money never enters the Flow/Lightning calculation. It’s boring, invested in the most stable (least extractive) instruments you can find, and you pretend it doesn’t exist for all ethical decision-making.

Rule 2: Going below the Floor is self-harm, not generosity. If you give away or deploy money from your Floor, you are not being heroic. You are making yourself a future burden and reducing your capacity for long-term contribution. This is not noble; it’s strategically foolish.

Rule 3: The Floor adjusts. Every 2-3 years, recalculate based on changing conditions. If you develop a chronic illness, the Floor rises. If you build cooperative support systems that reduce costs, it can fall. The Floor is not static—it reflects reality.

Rule 4: Above the Floor is Surplus. That’s what we’re talking about. Everything—EVERYTHING—that follows in this manifesto applies only to Surplus (capital above your Sovereign Floor). We are not discussing what to do with your survival resources. We are discussing what to do with wealth beyond resilience.

This single framing kills the martyrdom critique. No one can accuse you of hoarding if you’ve calculated and published your Floor. No one can demand you give away your healthcare fund. The Floor is defensive, transparent, and morally unassailable.

Everything above it? That’s where the protocol begins.

End of Part 1

Next: Part 2 will cover the First Fruits Rule, the Permissible Aims for Surplus, the Dynastic Sunset Clause, and the quarterly Janus Check—the actual enforcement mechanisms that turn these principles into accountable practice.