Every year seems to bring a new crisis, and every crisis comes with its own pre-packaged solution. Somehow the “answer” always looks like more technocratic management, more tracking, and more centralized control.
On the podcast this week, host Zahra Sethna is joined by researcher and author Jacob Nordangård to unpack the ‘Great Transitions’ initiative, a decades-old set of scenarios that don’t just imagine what the future could be like but actively work to build it.
Jacob breaks down three main pathways described in the model:
Conventional Worlds (business-as-usual, market-led or policy-led)
Barbarization (cascading crises, breakdown, conflict)
Great Transitions (the “ideal” future — global governance, global management, global systems)
The conversation also digs into a subtler danger: steered opposition. Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, posited that successful hegemonic powers integrate their opposition as a way to neutralize them. What if the opposition “movement” we’re seeing, which feels like resistance, is actually well-funded, carefully shaped, and designed to funnel people toward the same endpoint? This may well be what we’re seeing unfold in the West.
If this episode hits a nerve, share it with someone who’s been saying, “Something about this feels… coordinated.”
Books mentioned (affiliate links)
Rockefeller: Controlling the Game https://amzn.to/3O62ONF
The Global Coup d’État: The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset https://amzn.to/49JPhUw
Relevant links
Jacob Nordangård’s Substack
The Great Transition Report https://greattransition.org/documents/Great_Transition.pdf
Jacob Nordangård’s website https://jacobnordangard.se/en/
