Paul Polman, who ran Unilever for a decade and is no one’s idea of a radical, declared something a few years ago that ought to have detonated quietly inside every boardroom and cabinet office that heard it. The expertise and knowledge that qualified him for the top job yesterday, he observed, is precisely the expertise and knowledge that disqualifies him from knowing what to do today. And “knowing what to do” is supposedly the main function of the “leader”. He was talking about himself. He was being honest in a way that almost no one in his position permits himself to be, because the admission is not at all modest. It’s as shocking as it is total. It says that the mastery which carried a person to the summit yesterday is, under conditions of discontinuity and disruption, that which is most likely to mislead or distract today.
Sit with the structure of that claim, because it’s sharper than it first appears. Polman is not saying he is a novice in artificial intelligence or the latest strategic intelligence and has more to learn. He is not saying the world is complicated and humility is thus warranted. He is saying that competence itself — the accumulated pattern recognition, the hard-won instinct, and the architecture of judgement built over forty years — has become inverted. What was an asset is now a liability. The maps he and others are using are not just out of date. They are actively steering him into the rocks and steering him with all the confidence of a lifetime’s success as a captain of industry.
This is the condition faced by incumbent power as industrial economism starts to fracture. And it raises the question that almost no one asks of the powerful, because we’re trained instead to ask how they intend “leading” us through the transition. The smarter question is the one Polman’s honesty opens up: what happens to people whose entire qualification for authority has become the reason for their current blindness? How do they react when the ground they mastered begins to move under power they thought was theirs both to hold and to keep in near perpetuity?
Notice first what’s actually shifting, because I strongly suspect the word “transition” flatters the reality. ‘Transition’ suggests a managed passage from one settled state to another, a process with stewards and a timetable. What’s underway today is closer to a redistribution of where competence of any kind is actually located — the breakdown of every assumption and protocol designed to keep the status quo quarantined from contaminants.
And the competence in question is not the kind to be found at the centre. What the central mainstream understood was scale and procedure — how to standardise, certify, route, and command from a distance. What the periphery is recovering is something else entirely: the adaptive, place-based, relational competence of people who must live with the consequences of what others decide.
For two centuries the industrial settlement concentrated capability upward and inward — into capitals, into corporate centres, into the credentialed professions and into the institutions that certified them. To know how to do something at scale was to know how to route it through those hubs. The farmer deferred to the agricultural ministry, the patient to the medical hierarchy, and the citizen to the government department. This wasn’t just domination. It was a genuine concentration of working knowledge, and the deference it commanded was, for a time at least, partly earned.
That concentration is now reversing, unevenly and without formal announcement. The capacity to generate energy, to grow food, to make meaning, to coordinate action, to hold a community together through tough times, is migrating outward, into localities, into networks that detour around the centre, into communities and tribes and places that are quietly reclaiming what the centre spent generations extracting from them. You can see it where a valley reorganises its own power supply and stops waiting for the grid. Where a town that lost its bank invents the credit it needs among neighbours. Where a community holds knowledge of soil, water, and season that no ministry ever digitised and no algorithm can replace. Not everywhere, it must be said. And not yet at the scale that matters. But the direction is unmistakable to anyone with their eyes on the periphery rather than the summit.
And here’s the cruelty of it for those at the peak. The migration is mostly invisible from where they stand. Their instruments don’t measure it. Their advisers don’t report it, because their advisers were selected by the same filter that selected them, and the filter screens precisely for the knowledge that now disqualifies them. Even their most finely honed instincts don’t detect it. They are not stupid. They are not, most of them, even malign. They built whole careers mastering a world that’s rapidly coming to an end, and their mastery is the blindfold.
So how do they react? Watch closely, because the responses fall into a small number of recognisable contours, and the shape a person chooses largely determines their fate.
A very few do what Polman did. They notice the inversion. They say it aloud. And then they face the harder task, which is to act on it — to use whatever authority and resources they still command to widen the door for what’s coming rather than to barricade it. This is rarer than honesty, because while honesty costs discomfort, acting on the truth costs power. To genuinely let go is to use your remaining grip to loosen the grip itself, to spend your authority deliberately hastening its closure. It’s the political equivalent of a parent who understands that their entire success consists in becoming redundant. Almost nothing in the architecture of incumbent power rewards this, and almost nothing in the psychology of people who reach the peak of their endeavours can prepare them to deal with it. They climbed by resolutely holding on. That instinct is forged over a lifetime. Asking it to reverse at the summit is asking a great deal.
Lacking the courage to let go, most do something more plausible. They hang on. And the hanging on takes two forms, one pitiable and the other dangerous.
The pitiable form is denial dressed as continuity. These are the people in power who have been taught to believe they are leading change. The kind of “leaders” who respond to discontinuity by doing more of what made them successful, faster and louder. The corporation that meets disruption with a more aggressive version of its existing strategy. The government that answers a legitimacy crisis with a communications strategy. The institution responds to its own irrelevance by restructuring, rebranding, and convening a task force. There’s something almost touching about it — the spectacle of someone shouting in a language everyone else has stopped speaking.
They are not wrong about their own competence. They are wrong about whether that competence is relevant any longer.
The dangerous form is quite different, and it’s the one we should fear. When the powerful sense – not consciously, but in the body – that authority is draining from them and that no amount of skill will staunch it, a particular kind of character doesn’t let go and doesn’t merely flail. They reach for the one instrument that still answers to them when knowledge no longer does. They reach for force.
This is the hinge of the whole matter. And it’s the situation we’re confronting today in the geopolitical turmoil being stirred up by the Western empire and its proxies. The most damage in any civilisational metamorphosis is not caused by powerful men who remain confident but by the powerful who have begun, somewhere beneath articulation, to suspect they are obsolete.
A public figure secure in genuine self-mastery has no need of spectacle. It’s the individual whose competence has quietly expired and who senses it who needs the spectacle most — the show of strength, the enemy conjured, the crackdown, the wall, the war. Force is all that remains when legitimacy has gone and knowledge has turned traitor. It’s the last asset on a balance sheet from which everything else has been written down. And because it’s the last, it is grasped for with a desperation that confident authority never required.
We are watching this now, across more capitals than is comfortable to name. The strongman is not a figure of surplus power. He is a figure of power in terminal anxiety, a clown performing a proficiency he can feel slipping, converting the energy of his own obsolescence into the persecution of whoever can be made to represent a future he can’t interpret. The cruelty is not incidental. The cruelty is itself the confession. It marks the exact point where a system that once ruled by competence has been reduced to ruling by pain, because pain is the only language it has left that still commands obedience.
This is the gravity of ghosts at a civilisational scale — the lifeless compact reaching up through the living, demanding obedience past the point where it can offer anything in return, and willing to break a great deal on the way down. The damage such power can do on its descent is not a measure of its potency. It’s a measure of how badly it has lost and how unwilling it is to accept that fact.
What, then, is their fate? Any honest assessment must hold two truths that sit uneasily together.
The first truth is that they lose. Not because justice arrives — justice is not a force in the world, only an aspiration we sometimes inadvertently perform — but because the ground genuinely has moved, and no quantity of force conjures back a concentration of competence that has already dispersed. The strongman can jail the future’s carriers, exile or violate them, defund the places where they gather, and write their work out of the curriculum, but he can’t reinstall the knowledge in his own centre, because the knowledge was never a substance to be seized. It was a relationship, and the relationship has changed. He can win every battle his instruments can fight and still preside over an emptying. This is the fate of incumbent power that hangs on: to command an apparatus of diminishing reach with diminishing returns, mistaking the volume of its noise for the extent of its grip until one day the apparatus answers to no one and the centre discovers it’s just a ventriloquist that’s been talking to itself for years.
The second truth is tougher, and writing such as mine that naturally desires to console tends to omit it. They can do an enormous amount of harm on the way out. The interval between when power becomes obsolete and when it finally relinquishes its grip is the most dangerous passage a civilisation traverses. It’s the interval in which engineered stupidity is manufactured, scapegoats are selected, institutions are hollowed, and the violence is licensed. So while their fate is sealed, the damage they inflict en route to that fate is not. And the difference between a hard transition and a catastrophic one is very largely the difference in how much of that damage the rest of us can absorb, deflect, or refuse to enact on their behalf.
Meanwhile, the carriers are not beyond his reach in the interim. The valley can be flooded, the teacher silenced, the network surveilled, the activist arrested, and the gathering broken up before it coheres. The metamorphosis proceeds at the scale of the whole; it offers no protection to a particular local cell. Many who carry the future will not live to inhabit it. To say that incumbent power loses is not to say that those it fears are safe.
Which returns the matter, finally, to everyone the “leadership” question leaves out.
If the fate of incumbent power is mostly settled — loss, with a variable quantity of harm attached — then the more vital question, the one with real degrees of freedom in it, was never about them at all. It’s about what gets built in the same interval by the communities and locales and tribes into whose hands competence is now migrating. Their work doesn’t wait on the powerful to let go gracefully. The imaginal cells in the chrysalis don’t negotiate with the caterpillar’s immune system for permission to begin designing the butterfly. They start in the tissue for which the old body has no further use; they are already engaged in the act of creation while the old cells are still issuing instructions as they dissolve.
This is the quiet liberation hidden inside Polman’s terrible, candid revelation. If the knowledge that qualified the powerful has become the knowledge that disqualifies them, then authority has lost its last claim to be indispensable. The centre is not the place where the future will be fathomed out. It’s the place where the past is making its longest and most dangerous last stand. The future is being assembled elsewhere, in a myriad places at once, by people who were never credentialled to build it and are building it anyway.
And this relocates something for my readers, too. This essay has spoken of the powerful and the carriers as though they were other people, observed from a distance. They are not. Everyone alive today is doing one of two things, mostly without naming it: lending the old arrangement the obedience that keeps it standing, or investing in the new one the attention and labour that helps it cohere. There is no third space to occupy. To see the descent clearly is already to be asked which of these matters.
The powerful will hang on, most of them, until the instruments fall from their hands. That is their fate, and there’s a kind of freedom in seeing it clearly, because it transfers our attention to where it belongs. Not in the boardrooms and cabinet offices and law chambers, where a proficiency that has turned against itself acts out an illusion of authority it no longer holds. But on the wide periphery, where the new expertise is to be found – and where the only question that still has an open answer is being lived out, day by day, by everyone the old structure was never built to see.