A Note Before You Read

This article is an inquiry into how systems come into being and why they persist.

You will not find villains or heroes here. You will not be asked to take a side. What you may experience instead is the loss of an external enemy.

That loss can feel unsettling. It removes the comfort of blame and replaces it with a more demanding form of understanding. This is intentional.

The analysis acknowledges power, bad faith, and opportunism, but does not reduce complex, self-reinforcing systems to conspiracy or intent alone.

If you continue reading, you may find yourself less certain of who is at fault and more aware of how participation, disengagement, and silence shape the conditions we later experience as imposed.

This is not meant to persuade. It is meant to re-orient.

Orientation: Why This Inquiry Must Precede Ideology

This article is not written from a political position, an ideological stance, or a moral campaign. It is written from a sense-making position.

The subject matter it examines often collapses quickly into accusation, defence, or conspiracy. Global institutions, ESG frameworks, asset managers, elites, and power structures are commonly explained either as benevolent guardians or as malicious orchestrators. Both explanations feel satisfying. Neither is sufficient.

For clarity, ESG refers to environmental, social, and governance frameworks now widely used by corporations, regulators, asset managers, and policymakers to assess behaviour, risk, and legitimacy. Global institutions and forums such as the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and similar bodies function as convening, coordinating, and norm-setting environments that shape priorities, narratives, and standards across policy, economics, sustainability, and governance.

These frameworks and institutions matter not because they are inherently good or inherently corrupt, but because they have become central sites through which meaning, responsibility, and authority are mediated in contemporary systems.

Sense-making requires us to step back further.

Before asking who is right or wrong, we must ask how such systems come into being at all. What conditions make them intelligible, acceptable, demanded, and sustained. What layers of meaning, fear, aspiration, and avoidance allow them to exist and expand.

This inquiry, therefore, operates at a pre-ideological level. It is concerned not with positions, but with patterns. Not with villains or heroes, but with the architectures of meaning that give rise to institutions, narratives, and power gradients.

There is room here for bad faith. Elites are not exempt from opportunism, self-interest, or manipulation. Some actors knowingly exploit systems, frameworks, and narratives for personal, political, or economic gain. To deny this would itself be an act of bad faith.

But it is equally misleading to reduce complex, global, self-reinforcing systems to intentional conspiracy alone. Most systems of this scale are not designed top-down in secrecy. They emerge bottom-up through collective inauthenticities, unexamined assumptions, and shared avoidance of responsibility, and are later stabilised through institutions, standards, and governance mechanisms.

They persist because they are participated in.

Institutions do not float above society. They are built on top of a dominant metacontent. Legal systems, courts, policymakers, academic bodies, corporate governance frameworks, global forums, media narratives, and even the emotional economy of crowds all interact within the same underlying sense-making field.

This means responsibility is distributed. Sometimes passively through disengagement. Sometimes actively through design, reform, compliance, or silence. Sometimes through the desire to outsource complexity to authority rather than confront it directly.

What follows is not an attempt to expose a hidden enemy. It is an attempt to demystify a visible system by understanding how collective psyche, shadow, and inauthenticity create the very gradients of power we later feel subjected to.

This is a leadership problem. But not a leaders-only problem. It is a participative leadership problem, in which all of us are implicated to different degrees.

Only from this vantage point can authentic awareness begin.

Collective Shadow, Inauthenticity and the Emergence of Gradients

To understand how large-scale systems such as ESG, global institutions, and transnational governance frameworks emerge, we must first understand the role of collective shadow.

Shadow, in this context, is not malevolence. It is what remains unseen, unintegrated, or avoided at scale. Fears that are not faced. Responsibilities that are not owned. Contradictions that are managed rather than resolved. When this happens collectively, the shadow does not disappear. It reorganises itself into systems.

Modern societies carry several unresolved tensions. A desire for safety without responsibility. A demand for moral clarity without moral labour. A wish for certainty in a world that has become structurally complex. These tensions create pressure. That pressure does not stay abstract. It produces gradients.

Gradients of authority form where uncertainty concentrates. Gradients of legitimacy form where people seek reassurance. Gradients of power form where responsibility is deferred. None of this requires coordination or intent. It emerges naturally from shared inauthenticities.

This is where metacontent becomes decisive. When a dominant metacontent takes hold, one that frames complexity as something to be managed rather than understood, control becomes more attractive than sense-making. Metrics feel safer than judgment. Procedures feel safer than conscience. Alignment feels safer than discernment.

Institutions arise within this metacontent. They are not imposed from outside. They are demanded from within. Global frameworks promise coherence where meaning has thinned. Standards promise order where responsibility has fragmented. Oversight promises reassurance where trust has eroded.

At this stage, it is tempting to look for architects. It is comforting to believe that someone, somewhere, knows what they are doing. But in most cases, what we are witnessing is emergent coordination without shared awareness. Systems stabilise because they resonate with the unspoken needs of the collective psyche.

This does not absolve elites of responsibility. Power concentrates along gradients, and some actors learn to navigate and exploit those gradients deliberately. Bad faith enters here, not as the origin, but as an accelerant. Those with access, influence, or capital can amplify dynamics that already exist.

The critical mistake is to treat bad faith as the primary cause. Doing so obscures the deeper reality. Most people operating within these systems are not conspiring. They are complying, optimising, and adapting within a metacontent they did not consciously choose but have learned to inhabit.

This is how systems become self-sustaining. They are fed not only by power, but by participation. Not only by enforcement, but by acquiescence. Not only by leaders, but by followers who prefer delegation over engagement.

Before examining institutions, frameworks, or asset managers, this must be clear. What appears as external control often begins as internal avoidance. What later feels imposed was once implicitly invited.

From Shadow to Institution: Why Global Frameworks Emerge

When collective shadow and inauthenticity reach a certain density, institutions do not appear as impositions. They appear as solutions.

Global frameworks emerge at the point where societies no longer trust organic coordination but are unwilling to confront the deeper causes of that distrust. Faced with complexity, ambiguity, and competing values, there is a growing desire to stabilise reality from above rather than make sense of it from within.

Institutions such as international bodies, global forums, and standard-setting organisations arise within this context. They promise coordination without intimacy, order without relationship, and moral reassurance without shared ethical labour. Their appeal lies not in coercion, but in relief.

These frameworks offer a language that reduces complexity. They translate diffuse concerns into categories, indicators, targets, and commitments. In doing so, they make the world feel governable again. Uncertainty is converted into process. Anxiety is converted into policy.

This is not, in itself, an act of bad faith. It is a response to a genuine problem. As systems scale, local sense-making struggles to keep up. Global supply chains, financial markets, environmental impacts, and social movements exceed the capacity of traditional institutions to coordinate meaningfully. Something has to fill the gap.

What fills it is metacontent. A dominant narrative about what matters, what counts as responsible, and what signals legitimacy. Once this metacontent stabilises, institutions form to embody it, safeguard it, and reproduce it.

Over time, these institutions begin to feel inevitable. Their frameworks are treated as neutral. Their language becomes default. Their assumptions harden into norms. At this point, questioning them is often experienced not as critique, but as threat.

Here the devil’s advocate must be taken seriously. Without some form of global coordination, real problems would remain unaddressed. Environmental degradation, systemic financial risk, and cross-border harm are not imaginary. The impulse to respond collectively is not misguided.

The failure does not lie in the existence of institutions. It lies in what they are built upon.

When institutions are constructed on top of unresolved shadow and inauthenticity, they inherit those qualities. They begin to manage symptoms rather than address causes. They stabilise narratives rather than deepen understanding. They substitute alignment for authenticity.

As a result, they become both necessary and insufficient. Necessary because the problems are real. Insufficient because the mode of response bypasses sense-making.

This is the tension that defines the current moment. Institutions persist not because they are fully trusted, but because alternatives feel riskier. They are criticised and relied upon at the same time. This ambivalence is not accidental. It is the psychological signature of systems built to compensate for what societies have not yet integrated.

Sustainabilism and the Choice of How to Engage with Reality

Sustainabilism is not a political ideology, nor a moral position aimed at categorising people or creating enemies. It names a particular way of engaging with reality.

At its core, Sustainabilism describes an existential and ontological choice: the choice to relate to complexity through management rather than meaning, through control rather than understanding, and through compliance rather than responsibility.

In this mode, sustainability is approached as a technical problem to be solved rather than a human condition to be lived. Reality is treated as something that must be stabilised, measured, governed, and optimised from the outside. What matters most is not coherence, but manageability.

This is why Sustainabilism manifests so comfortably through frameworks, standards, targets, metrics, reporting mechanisms, and oversight structures. It translates concern into procedure, ethics into indicators, and responsibility into compliance. In doing so, it offers reassurance. It gives the impression of action, progress, and control in the face of uncertainty.

This approach can appear effective, even necessary, especially in large-scale systems. But its limitations are structural.

By prioritising behaviour over Being, Sustainabilism bypasses intention, authenticity, and ethical coherence. It focuses on what can be seen, audited, and enforced, while neglecting the inner orientation from which sustainable action actually arises. Over time, this leads to performative alignment rather than genuine transformation.

Sustainabilism is therefore not “wrong” in a moral sense. It is incomplete in an ontological sense. It represents one way of engaging with reality, but not the most generative or sustainable one.

This distinction is explored in depth in the book Sustainabilism, which examines how well-intentioned sustainability efforts collapse into control-based systems when sense-making is replaced by management.

Importantly, this work does not stop at critique.

Alongside Sustainabilism, a reconstructive alternative is articulated through the Authentic Sustainability Framework. Authentic Sustainability begins from a different starting point. It treats sustainability not as an external programme imposed on systems, but as an emergent outcome of coherent Being, meaningful sense-making, and lived responsibility.

Where Sustainabilism asks how behaviour can be regulated, Authentic Sustainability asks how human beings and institutions relate to reality, value, and consequence. Where Sustainabilism relies on enforcement and metrics, Authentic Sustainability relies on awareness, integrity, and participative leadership.

The difference is not cosmetic. It is foundational.

One approach seeks to stabilise systems by controlling outcomes. The other seeks to sustain systems by restoring coherence at their source.

Understanding this distinction is essential, not to reject existing frameworks outright, but to recognise their limits and the conditions under which they quietly undermine the very goals they claim to serve.

ESG as a Case Study in Sustainabilism and Managerial Meaning

ESG is not an anomaly. It is a crystallisation.

It represents what happens when sustainability is translated into the dominant metacontent of management, measurement, and control. In this sense, ESG is not a distortion of sustainability. It is sustainability expressed within the only language the system currently knows how to speak.

This is where Sustainabilism becomes visible.

Sustainabilism, as developed in this body of work, names the moment when sustainability is stripped of its ontological and ethical depth and reconstituted as a managerial programme. Meaning is replaced by metrics. Responsibility is replaced by reporting. Integrity is replaced by compliance. What remains is a system that looks active while remaining structurally inert.

ESG operates almost entirely at the behavioural and procedural layers. It asks whether policies exist, disclosures are complete, targets are set, and governance structures conform. It does not, and cannot, assess intention, authenticity, or ethical coherence. Those dimensions sit outside its ontology.

From a devil’s advocate position, this limitation is understandable. Large-scale systems require comparability. Investors need standardisation. Regulators need auditable signals. ESG provides a shared grammar that allows capital to move with some sense of order.

The problem is not that ESG exists. The problem is that it is increasingly mistaken for sustainability itself.

When a framework designed to manage risk and disclosure is elevated to moral authority, a category error occurs. Sustainability becomes something that can be scored, optimised, and enforced, rather than something that must be understood, embodied, and lived.

This produces a predictable outcome. Organisations learn how to improve scores without improving substance. They invest in optics rather than transformation. They align outwardly while remaining internally fragmented.

This is not necessarily driven by cynicism. It is driven by incentives. When the system rewards appearance over depth, appearance becomes rational behaviour. Sustainabilism thrives precisely because it offers the comfort of action without the discomfort of change.

Here again, bad faith plays a role but does not dominate. Some actors knowingly exploit ESG for reputational gain. Others simply adapt to the environment as it is structured. Most operate somewhere in between, navigating expectations they did not design but must survive within.

ESG therefore functions exactly as a Sustainabilist construct would. It stabilises anxiety, signals virtue, manages exposure, and preserves the underlying logic of the system. What it does not do is reorient sense-making at the level where sustainability actually begins.

That level is Being.

How Asset Managers Consume and Reinforce These Frameworks

Large asset managers such as Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street, and similar institutions do not sit outside this system. They are among its most consequential participants.

It is tempting to cast them as architects. It is more accurate to understand them as amplifiers.

At the scale at which these firms operate, traditional notions of choice collapse. They are not picking individual companies in the way smaller investors do. They are structurally embedded across markets, sectors, and geographies. They are universal owners. Their primary exposure is not to single firms, but to the stability of the system itself.

From this position, ESG becomes useful.

It provides a shared language through which risk can be assessed, compared, and communicated. Climate risk, social risk, governance risk are not evaluated as moral questions, but as potential sources of volatility, litigation, regulation, and reputational damage. ESG offers a way to translate diffuse uncertainty into something legible.

This is where consumption turns into reinforcement.

By relying on ESG scores, frameworks, and standards, asset managers give them weight. Capital flows begin to follow metrics. Corporate behaviour adjusts accordingly. What was once a reporting framework becomes a behavioural signal. What was once optional becomes normative.

From a devil’s advocate perspective, this is rational. Without some form of standardisation, large-scale capital allocation would be blind. Asset managers cannot individually assess the ethical coherence of thousands of firms. They must rely on proxies.

The deeper issue lies elsewhere.

By outsourcing judgment to frameworks, asset managers also outsource responsibility. Decisions appear neutral, technical, and defensible. The framework becomes the authority. This allows influence without ownership and alignment without accountability.

Once embedded, the loop tightens. Companies adapt to ESG expectations. Rating agencies refine their models. Asset managers integrate scores more deeply. Regulators reference the same standards. Each actor is responding to the others. No single entity is fully in control, yet the system moves coherently.

This is how self-sustaining systems operate.

Bad faith enters selectively. Some actors use ESG deliberately to advance political agendas, entrench power, or silence dissent. Others exploit its ambiguity for commercial gain. But most participants are not acting conspiratorially. They are optimising within a metacontent that rewards conformity and penalises deviation.

What results is not tyranny by design, but governance by inertia. A system that persists because it is easier to comply than to question, easier to report than to reflect, easier to align than to make sense.

Asset managers do not create this condition alone. But by consuming and amplifying ESG, they help stabilise a Sustainabilist logic that reaches far beyond finance into law, policy, academia, and public discourse.

Self-Reinforcing Loops and Systemic Closure

Once these frameworks are embedded across institutions, a self-reinforcing dynamic takes hold.

What began as a response to uncertainty becomes a source of certainty in its own right. Standards inform ratings. Ratings inform capital allocation. Capital allocation shapes corporate behaviour. Corporate behaviour validates the standards. Each layer confirms the others.

This is systemic closure.

Within such systems, feedback increasingly circulates internally rather than being tested against lived reality. Metrics reference other metrics. Policies justify further policies. Compliance is validated by audits rather than outcomes. The system begins to believe in itself.

From the outside, this can look like coordination or even control. From the inside, it feels like necessity. Each actor is responding rationally to incentives produced by the system as it already exists. Questioning the framework feels destabilising, even irresponsible.

Here, the collective shadow deepens. Responsibility is diffused. No one feels fully accountable, yet everyone participates. Decisions are justified as inevitable. Language hardens. Dissent is reframed as ignorance, denial, or moral failure rather than as a signal that sense-making may be breaking down.

This is where conspiracy narratives gain traction. When systems become opaque and self-referential, people look for hidden hands. The intuition that something is wrong is often correct. The conclusion that it must be centrally orchestrated is not.

The more accurate explanation is structural. These systems persist because they reduce anxiety, distribute responsibility, and offer moral reassurance without demanding deep engagement. They are sustained by participation, not secrecy.

Bad faith intensifies these loops but does not create them. Actors who recognise the dynamics can exploit them, shaping narratives, silencing critique, or advancing interests under the cover of legitimacy. Yet even this exploitation relies on a system that already discourages authentic questioning.

At this stage, the system becomes resistant to correction. Reform is absorbed as extension. Critique is rebranded as compliance. Alternatives are framed as risk. The possibility of stepping outside the dominant metacontent diminishes.

What remains is not a conspiracy, but a closure of sense-making. A world where action continues, language multiplies, and authority expands, while understanding quietly contracts.

Bad Faith Without Reductionism

Any serious account of power that refuses to acknowledge bad faith is incomplete. Any account that reduces everything to bad faith is misleading.

Bad faith exists within these systems. Some actors consciously manipulate narratives, exploit institutional ambiguity, and leverage moral language for strategic gain. There are individuals and groups who understand the mechanics well enough to advance interests while presenting themselves as guardians of virtue. To deny this would be naïve.

But bad faith is not the foundation of the system. It is a secondary phenomenon that flourishes once certain conditions are already in place.

Bad faith requires cover. It requires opacity, diffusion of responsibility, and moral ambiguity. These conditions are not created by elites alone. They arise when collective sense-making weakens and responsibility is outsourced to frameworks, institutions, and abstractions.

This is why conspiratorial explanations fail. They assume intentional design where emergence is the dominant force. They locate causality exclusively in a small group, thereby absolving the broader system and the wider public of participation. In doing so, they replicate the very avoidance they seek to expose.

From the perspective of Sustainabilism, bad faith functions as an accelerant, not an engine. It speeds up processes that are already underway. It sharpens incentives. It exploits gaps. But it does not generate the underlying metacontent.

The deeper issue is inauthenticity. When societies demand outcomes without responsibility, morality without sacrifice, and safety without agency, they generate environments where bad faith becomes adaptive. Opportunism is rewarded because coherence has already been abandoned.

This distinction matters. If bad faith were the primary cause, removing certain actors would resolve the problem. History suggests otherwise. Systems persist, reconfigure, and reproduce similar dynamics even as individuals change.

Bad faith thrives where Being is fragmented. Where intention is disconnected from action. Where ethics is replaced by signalling. Addressing it therefore requires more than exposure. It requires reorientation.

This is uncomfortable, because it returns responsibility to the collective. Not equally, not symmetrically, but undeniably.

Blame offers psychological relief. Sense-making demands participation.

Why Most People Cannot Simply Choose Otherwise

At this point, a familiar objection arises. If these systems are flawed, why do people not simply reject them. Why not disengage, reform, or build alternatives.

This objection assumes a level of agency that most individuals and institutions do not actually possess.

People do not encounter systems from a neutral position. They inherit them. Incentives, career paths, reputational risks, legal obligations, and social expectations shape the field long before conscious choice enters the picture. What feels like consent is often adaptation. What feels like support is often survival.

Within dominant metacontent, deviation carries cost. Questioning frameworks can threaten careers. Withholding compliance can invite suspicion. Refusing alignment can be framed as irresponsibility or moral failure. Under these conditions, participation becomes rational even when belief is thin.

This is how stories and narratives emerge.

When people cannot act authentically, they compensate narratively. Some adopt the language of the system more enthusiastically than they believe. Others retreat into cynicism. Others construct conspiratorial explanations to restore a sense of agency and clarity. These responses differ in form but share the same root. A loss of meaningful participation in shaping reality.

The crowd plays a critical role here. Collective emotions amplify signals. Moral certainty becomes contagious. Complexity is flattened into slogans. Social belonging is tied to visible alignment. Under such pressure, not choosing becomes a choice in itself.

This is not weakness of character. It is a structural feature of large-scale systems that operate without authentic sense-making. Expecting individuals to simply opt out misunderstands how power, risk, and belonging interact.

The result is a paradox. Systems appear to be chosen by everyone, yet truly owned by no one. Responsibility dissolves into process. Agency fragments across roles. Outcomes emerge without authorship.

This is why reform that focuses only on leaders, institutions, or policies repeatedly fails. It addresses symptoms without touching the underlying condition. The problem is not that people refuse to act. It is that action has been disconnected from meaning.

To resolve this requires more than opposition. It requires re-entering the space of participation with awareness rather than compliance.

Participative Leadership and the Role of Being

What has been described so far is often framed as a leadership failure. In one sense, this is accurate. But it is incomplete.

The condition we are witnessing is better understood as a failure of participative leadership. Leadership not as a position, but as a shared mode of relating to reality. A way in which individuals, institutions, and societies co-create direction through engagement rather than delegation.

When leadership is externalised, when responsibility is projected upward to institutions, experts, or frameworks, the system compensates by becoming more directive. Authority hardens because participation has thinned. Control expands because ownership has receded.

This is where Being becomes decisive.

Systems reflect the quality of Being that animates them. Fragmented Being produces fragmented systems. Inauthentic Being produces performative governance. When intention, awareness, and responsibility are misaligned at the human level, no amount of structural reform can restore coherence at the systemic level.

Participative leadership begins with sense-making rather than compliance. It requires individuals to engage with complexity instead of outsourcing it. To tolerate ambiguity rather than demand premature certainty. To recognise their role not only as subjects of systems, but as contributors to the conditions that sustain them.

This does not mean that all responsibility is equal. Power is uneven. Influence is asymmetrical. But participation is still real. Through voting, consumption, professional conduct, silence, adaptation, and disengagement, people continuously shape the field in which institutions operate.

From a devil’s advocate perspective, this may sound idealistic. Large systems cannot function if everyone questions everything. Coordination requires stability. Authority requires some degree of delegation.

This is true.

But delegation without awareness degenerates into abdication. Stability without meaning becomes rigidity. Authority without participation becomes brittle.

The Being Framework makes this visible. It shows that sustainable order cannot be imposed from the outside. It must be lived from the inside. Ethics cannot be enforced without collapsing into control. Responsibility cannot be automated without hollowing out agency.

Participative leadership is therefore not a call for decentralisation or rebellion. It is a call for reorientation. A shift from asking who is in charge to asking how we are relating to what is in front of us.

Without this shift, systems will continue to reproduce the same patterns under new names. With it, the possibility of authentic sustainability re-enters the field.

Conclusion: Toward Authentic Awareness Beyond Sustainabilism

What this inquiry reveals is neither a hidden cabal nor a benevolent order gone wrong. It reveals a pattern of sense-making failure that operates across scales, from individual Being to global institutions.

Frameworks such as ESG, global bodies, and transnational governance structures did not emerge in a vacuum. They arose within a dominant metacontent shaped by collective shadow, inauthenticity, and the widespread desire to manage complexity without fully inhabiting it. They persist not because they are universally believed in, but because they stabilise anxiety, distribute responsibility, and offer the appearance of moral orientation.

Bad faith exists within this landscape. Some actors knowingly exploit the system. Some leverage moral language for power, protection, or profit. But bad faith alone cannot explain the persistence, reach, or legitimacy of these structures. To reduce the problem to elites or conspiracies is to misunderstand its depth and to repeat the same abdication of responsibility that allowed the system to form.

The more uncomfortable truth is this. These systems are participative. They are sustained by compliance, adaptation, silence, optimisation, and disengagement. They are reinforced through law, policy, academia, corporate governance, media narratives, and the emotional economy of crowds. They reflect not only leadership failure, but a collective reluctance to engage in the work of sense-making.

This is why Sustainabilism cannot resolve the crises it seeks to address. It manages symptoms while leaving the underlying ontology untouched. It replaces ethical coherence with metrics, responsibility with reporting, and authenticity with alignment. In doing so, it deepens the very conditions that make control appear necessary.

Authentic sustainability begins elsewhere. It begins with authentic awareness. With recognising how meaning is constructed, how responsibility is deferred, and how Being shapes systems long before policies do. It begins when individuals and institutions alike stop asking how to enforce outcomes and start asking how they are participating in the conditions that produce them.

This is not a call to abandon institutions, nor to romanticise decentralisation. It is a call to re-enter leadership as a participative act grounded in sense-making rather than control. To see systems not as external forces acting upon us, but as expressions of how we collectively relate to reality.

Until that shift occurs, new frameworks will continue to emerge, old ones will be rebranded, and the cycle will repeat under different names. With it, the possibility opens for systems that are not merely managed, but meaningfully sustained.