We often hear the phrase, “The system is broken.” We say it when housing becomes unaffordable, when wages stagnate while productivity soars, or when religious and political polarization tears communities apart.
We assume that if we just fix the “glitches,” society will return to a state of harmony.
But there is a darker, more cynical, yet increasingly compelling alternative theory: The system isn’t broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.
A quote recently circulating on social media captures this perfectly:
“If you keep people exhausted and distracted, they won’t organize. If you keep them struggling and divided, they won’t resist.”
This is not just a philosophical observation. It is the outcome of a specific tactical doctrine known as “Flooding the Zone.” It is a strategy being deployed in real-time, from the policy playbooks of Washington D.C. to the information battlefields of Eastern Europe.
Here is how the system is designed to function, using the tactic of the “Flood” to enforce the three pillars of control: Exhaustion, Distraction, and Division.
Listen to a deep-dive episode by the Google NotebookLM Podcasters, as they explore this article in their unique style, blending light banter with thought-provoking studio conversations.
1. The Master Tactic: “Flooding the Zone”
The concept is borrowed from sports like ice hockey and football. To “flood the zone” is to overload a specific area of the field with more players than the defense can handle. The defense panics, their formation breaks, and they fail because they simply cannot cover every threat at once.
In the political sphere, this tactic was famously articulated by strategists like Steve Bannon, who noted that the modern way to deal with the media and opposition is to “flood the zone with sht.”*
The Project 2025 Blueprint This is not theoretical. In the United States, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 provides a manual for this exact strategy. It is not just about winning an election; it is about dismantling the “administrative state” by flooding it with loyalists.
- The Tactic: Project 2025 proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of civil servant jobs as political appointees (known as “Schedule F”). Instead of slowly changing policy, the plan is to fire expert bureaucrats en masse and flood the agencies with vetted ideologues.
- The Effect: This creates an immediate shock to the system. The institutions that usually provide checks and balances (the DOJ, the EPA, the Department of Education) are overwhelmed from the inside. They cannot resist the changes because the people who would usually resist have been purged and replaced in a “blitzkrieg” of hiring.
The Global Context: The “Firehose of Falsehood” This is not unique to America. International observers, particularly those monitoring Russian propaganda, have named this the “Firehose of Falsehood.”
- The Strategy: State actors do not just tell one lie; they tell fifty contradictory stories. They will claim an event didn’t happen, that it happened but was an accident, and that it happened and was actually the victim’s fault—all at the same time.
- The Goal: The goal is not to convince you of a specific truth. The goal is to exhaust your ability to find the truth. When people are bombarded with conflicting information, they eventually check out.
2. The Mechanics of Exhaustion: “Too Tired to Fight”
Once the zone is flooded with chaos, the population enters a state of survival mode. This is the first pillar of control: physical and mental exhaustion.
The Theory Political organization requires surplus energy. You need time to read legislation, attend town halls, organize strikes, or even just think deeply about your circumstances.
If you are struggling to pay rent or put food on the table, your horizon of focus shrinks to the next 24 hours. You cannot dismantle a system when you are too busy trying to survive it.
Real-Life Examples
- The Gig Economy & “Hustle Culture”: From New York to Mumbai, the normalization of the “side hustle” is framed as empowerment. In reality, it is often a necessity. When a single full-time job no longer covers the cost of living, workers take on Uber driving, food delivery, or freelance tasks. The result is a 60-70 hour work week that leaves zero capacity for civic engagement.
- The “996” Culture: In China’s tech sector, the “996” schedule (9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week) became infamous. While extreme, it mirrors the global trend of “always-on” availability, where smartphones tether employees to their bosses 24/7.
Why it’s by design: Exhaustion keeps labor cheap and compliant. A fearful, tired workforce is less likely to unionize or risk losing their income by protesting.
3. The Architecture of Distraction: “The Dopamine Loop”
If exhaustion takes away your energy, distraction takes away your focus. We are living in the age of the Attention Economy, where human attention is the most valuable commodity being mined.
The Theory To prevent people from noticing systemic inequality, you must keep them entertained. As long as the “circus” (entertainment, scandal, outrage) is engaging enough, people won’t look closely at the “bread” (economic policy, corruption).
The “Flood the Zone” tactic relies on this: if you create ten scandals a day, the media will chase the most sensational ones, leaving the boring but dangerous policy changes to pass unnoticed.
Real-Life Examples
- Algorithmic Doom-Scrolling: Social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X are engineered by the smartest minds in psychology and data science to be addictive. They prioritize short, emotional bursts of content. This fragments our attention spans, making it nearly impossible to engage with complex, nuanced political issues.
- The 24-Hour Outrage Cycle: Modern news cycles prioritize sensationalism over substance. We spend weeks debating a celebrity slap or a viral dress color, while legislation regarding corporate tax loopholes or environmental deregulation passes quietly in the background.
Why it’s by design: A distracted population is a passive population. If you can keep people angry about trivialities, they won’t have the bandwidth to be angry about structural injustice.
4. The Strategy of Division: “Us vs. Them”
The final and most effective tool is division. If the exhausted and distracted masses ever did look up, they would realize they vastly outnumber those in power. To prevent this, the “many” must be pitted against each other.
The Theory This is classic “Divide and Conquer.” By framing social issues as zero-sum games (e.g., “If they get rights, you lose yours”), systems of power ensure that the working class fights itself rather than the ruling class.
Real-Life Examples
- Culture Wars: Across Europe and the Americas, political discourse is increasingly defined by identity battles rather than economic policy. Debates are framed to trigger tribal instincts—Left vs. Right, Rural vs. Urban, Native vs. Immigrant.
- Scarcity Narratives: In the UK and US, lower-income citizens are often told that immigrants are “stealing their jobs” or straining public services. This directs anger horizontally (at other struggling people) rather than vertically (at the policymakers who underfunded those services in the first place).
Why it’s by design: Division is the ultimate insurance policy for the status quo. As long as the struggling middle class blames the struggling poor, the elite remain untouched.
The System is Working
To call this system “broken” implies that it has malfunctioned. It implies that the goal of the economy is human well-being, and it has accidentally failed to deliver it.
But if we look at the results—record corporate profits, the consolidation of wealth, and the entrenchment of political power—the machine is functioning at 100% efficiency.
- Flooding the Zone overwhelms our defenses.
- Exhaustion ensures we are too tired to rebuild them.
- Distraction ensures we don’t notice who is attacking.
- Division ensures we fight each other instead of the attackers.
Recognizing that this is a design, not an accident, is the first step toward changing it. You cannot fix a machine that isn’t broken; you have to build a new one.
The Trap of Predictable Resistance
This brings us to the most uncomfortable realization of all: The system wants you to resist in the usual ways.
Project 2025 and its global equivalents are not afraid of people marching on sidewalks with cardboard signs. They are not afraid of you honking horns or fighting with strangers in the comment sections of newspapers and social media. In fact, they count on it.
That noise feeds the system. It adds to the “flood.” When you spend your limited energy screaming into the void of the internet, you are not fighting the machine; you are powering it. You are exhausting yourself exactly as designed, leaving you with nothing left for real change.
Furthermore, compliance is just another form of being fractured. If you see this design clearly but stay silent because you are afraid of losing your job, you are fractured. If you follow the rules of a rigged game because you fear the consequences of standing your ground, the system has already won.
It relies on a population that is just broken enough to stay in line, but just angry enough to waste their energy on useless noise.
The Only Thing The System Fears
The only true counter-weight to a design built on exhaustion and distraction is to pull your energy back.
We must refuse to engage on their terms. Do not doom-scroll. Do not feed the algorithm your outrage. Do not let them fracture your focus.
Instead, we must do the one thing the system cannot process: Become Self-Led Individuals.
The revolutionary act is not found in the streets, but in interdimensional inspired personal deep transformation. It is the rigorous work of mending your own internal fractures—the fear, the need for external validation, and the compliance.
A person who has healed their fractures and sources their stability from within cannot be manipulated.
They cannot be exhausted by the news cycle because they do not run on its energy. They cannot be divided because they are whole.
The system is a machine built to manage broken parts. It breaks down when it encounters a whole human being.
So, do exactly what they do not want you to do: Become a powerful, self-led individual. That is the only glitch this design cannot fix.
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