by Mark A. Shryock
https://markashryock.substack.com/p/the-great-unraveling
This is one of a series of posts I made in December of 2025 and January 2026. I am resharing because it seems relevant now.
For years, I looked at the map of the world and saw “The United States” as a solid thing, a protagonist in a complicated story. I saw the West as the architect of modernity. But recently, the light changed. It wasn’t that the world got darker; it was that the lights finally turned on in the basement, and I saw what the foundation was actually built on.
I used to think the deepest shadow lay in the Vatican, in the ancient, calcified dogma of the Church. I thought that was the ultimate weight on the human spirit. But I was wrong. The Church sought to capture the soul, but this, this American Corporate Empire, seeks to devour the Earth itself. I don’t think any country has wielded as much power while causing as much harm as the USA has.
I look back now, and the history books read like confessions. I see the phantom tracks of trolleys that were ripped out of the asphalt in American cities, destroyed because they stood in the way of cars and oil. I see the Green Revolution not as a miracle of science, but as a violent act of colonization, a way to hook self-sustaining farmers on a drip-feed of patented seeds and petrochemicals.
Then I look at what happened to the land itself, to the food that grew freely.
I see it in Africa with the Bambara groundnut. It was there all along, resilient, healing the soil, feeding the people a complete food. It was a gift from the Earth. And the Empire looked at it and saw nothing, because you cannot patent a weed that grows by itself. So they buried it under monocultures that stripped the life from the soil, creating hunger where there was once abundance, just to sell the cure.
But it didn’t just happen over there. It happened right here, under our feet.
I look at the fields of the Midwest, chemically scorched to grow corn syrup and ethanol, and I see the ghosts of what was destroyed. I see Lambsquarters, a “weed” we were taught to spray and kill. Yet, it had been used as food for over 5,000 years, and it contains a complete protein profile and vastly more nutrition than the spinach we buy wrapped in plastic; it grows freely, without irrigation, without Monsanto’s permission. It was food, free and abundant, and they made us call it a pest because they couldn’t sell it to us.
I see the Jerusalem Artichoke, the native sunflower root that sustained people here for thousands of years. It grows perennially, it laughs at frost, it heals the soil. But you can’t ship it halfway around the world for profit like a commodity, so it was pushed to the margins, erased from our memory, replaced by potatoes that rot and require pesticides.
We destroyed the things that were good. We hid the abundance that was natural.
I see the ghost of over seventy governments, from Latin America to the Middle East, toppled not for “democracy,” but because a leader dared to say, “This fruit, this oil, this land belongs to my people.”
And it hasn’t stopped; the mask has simply fallen off. I see it now as Trump talks of buying Greenland like it is merely real estate to be acquired, ignoring the people and the ice, seeing only the resources beneath. I see the eyes turning toward Venezuela, not to liberate, but to take the oil. It is the same dark hunger that has always been there, only now it is loud and unashamed.
I see now that scarcity was a lie. There was always enough food. There was always enough energy. We didn’t need to poison the water or tear open the mountains. We did those things because the system is a machine that only knows how to eat. It is a spirit of extraction that mistakes destruction for growth.
And as I stand here, feeling the vibration of the world beginning to shift, this transition into 5D, into a consciousness of unity and transparency, I realize something that gives me both a shiver and a strange sense of peace:
This thing cannot come with us.
This structure, this “United States of Extraction,” is a heavy, dense, low-vibration construct. It is built on secrets, separation, and suffering. As the frequency rises, as the light gets brighter, the shadows have nowhere to hide. You cannot bring a system of slavery into a dimension of liberation. You cannot bring a machine of death into a world that is remembering it is alive.
So, what will it be?
I imagine the Empire dissolving like salt in warm water. The borders, drawn in blood, might fade. The name “USA” might remain as a geographic designator, but the entity, the corporation masquerading as a country, will cease to function because its fuel source (fear and separation) is running dry.
What is left will be the land. The Turtle Island that was here before the maps. What is left will be the communities returning to the “trolley” way of thinking, sharing, connecting. What is left will be the Bambara groundnuts, the Lambsquarters, and the Jerusalem Artichokes bursting through the cracks of the factory farms’ bones, reclaiming the soil.
It will not be a collapse of the world; it will be the shedding of a skin that has grown too tight, too dry, and too dead for the living being underneath to breathe. The evil isn’t winning; it is flailing because it knows its time is over.
And to those who are afraid, I hear you. I see your messages. We all feel fear at times not knowing what is coming in these times of great change. But the future will far better than what we have now. We are not going back to rubbing sticks together. We are going forward to something wiser, something that remembers how to live. And nobody that chooses to go with us, no matter the age, or whatever other reason you might believe you have nothing left to give, is getting left behind. Gives us your light and love. We need you. Come with us.
Yes, we may need to get through a couple of years of scarcity and collapse. But we will do it together, as a nation, as neighbors to the world. We will prepare with the things that will actually help us survive: the Lambsquarters, the Jerusalem Artichokes, the knowledge that was buried but never died.
You do not need to fear losing your Social Security or the things you think you must have, because everybody will be in the same boat. And when we are all in the same boat, we build it together. We make it a lifeboat.
And as this Empire flails and screams in its death throes, we must protect the persecuted, the immigrants, the vulnerable, all those it will lash out at in its panic. We must be the shield as the old world dies.
But know this: a new world, a far, far better world, is already being born. You are not watching an ending. You are midwifing a beginning.