By Josh Stylman at Brownstone dot org.

The infrastructure is now visible to those willing to see it. The systematic replacement of natural systems with artificial ones has reached into every domain - money, food, health, education, information. What began as isolated changes has revealed itself as a coordinated operation: the complete substitution of reality with decree, ownership with access, competence with credentials.

The mathematical engineering of ownership out of reach becomes clear - from 52% of 30-year-olds owning homes in 1950 to a projected 13% by 2025. Extraction was rebranded as liberation - the subscription economy that converts your $3,000 monthly into someone else's equity while you build nothing. These aren't separate trends but components of what I documented in "Fiat Everything" - the coordinated substitution of authentic systems with fabricated ones designed for extraction.

That piece showed how the fiat money template spread across every domain of human experience: creating artificial scarcity, manufacturing dependency, and harvesting human energy through decree rather than value creation.

But the operation runs deeper than the economic and cultural plunder I previously documented. They didn't just loot us financially and culturally. They rewired our psychology to make resistance impossible.

The Warning: Catherine's Panopticon

Catherine Austin Fitts published "Plunder: Financing the Panopticon" last week, connecting dots that reveal the full scope of the operation. The surveillance infrastructure isn't just watching us - it's actively conditioning us for compliance. What she calls the "panopticon" creates the psychological substrate that makes extraction possible.

Her work has long explored themes of sovereignty and financial freedom, but this latest analysis shows the endgame: we're not just being robbed - we're being programmed to participate in our own robbery.

This is the villain's masterpiece: a system so sophisticated that it harvests not just our wealth but our very capacity for resistance.

The data proves the conditioning is working. A chart published last week by Financial Times data reporter John Burn-Murdoch shows young adults' personalities changing in real-time.

Conscientiousness - the trait that builds wealth, delays gratification, and resists manipulation - is in freefall among 16-39 year-olds. While older generations maintain stable personality patterns, younger cohorts show dramatic psychological shifts perfectly timed with the maturation of surveillance capitalism.

This isn't natural personality change. It's engineered compliance. What began as laboratory experiments in consciousness control has evolved into mass media entrainment - the killer application of psychological manipulation. The recent certification of a class action lawsuit by children of MKUltra victims demonstrates these weren't isolated experiments - they were the prototype for mass psychological conditioning.

The same techniques once tested on unwitting subjects now reach billions through devices they carry willingly.

Lower conscientiousness creates perfect citizens for a fiat world: impulsive, debt-prone, dependent on external validation, incapable of long-term planning. The same systems that price you out of ownership simultaneously condition you to prefer access over assets, subscriptions over purchases, digital relationships over physical community.

The feedback loop is elegant and vicious. Economic desperation drives people into surveillance systems - need the app for the gig job, need the credit score for the apartment, need the platform for the side hustle. The surveillance conditions breed psychological dependency. The dependency ensures continued participation in extraction. Each interaction harvests both your data and your agency, creating citizens who are easier to manage and harder to satisfy.

This system isn't just a control mechanism - it's a wealth extraction machine that pays for itself by making its su...