What We Do After Humpty Trumpty

What We Do After Humpty Trumpty

There’s an old nursery rhyme that every child learns, but few adults take seriously:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.

We treat this as a cute children’s story. It’s actually a systems engineering principle.

Some failures are recoverable. You restore from backup, roll back to a previous state, and continue operations. Other failures are catastrophic; the system doesn’t snap back to its previous equilibrium. It reorganizes into something new, or it stays broken.

The question Americans should be asking isn’t whether we can put the pre-Trump order back together. The question is whether we should even try.

The IT Guy’s Perspective

I spent 30 years as a systems architect for Fortune 500 companies. When you’re responsible for systems that millions of people depend on, you learn certain non-negotiable principles:

Backups. You maintain copies of critical data and configurations so you can restore function if something fails.

Rollback capability. When a new deployment breaks things, you need the ability to return to the last working state.

Redundancy. No single point of failure. If one component fails, others take over the essential functions.

Graceful degradation. Even when parts of the system fail, the core function continues.

Now look at what’s happening to American institutions:

Prosecutors with decades of expertise are resigning en masse because they’re being asked to investigate victims instead of shooters. That institutional knowledge is gone. It walks out the door and doesn’t come back.

The DOJ Civil Rights Division, the unit that investigated the officers who killed George Floyd and Tyre Nichols, just lost its entire leadership team. A generation of expertise, deleted.

Congressional oversight is being ignored. Laws are being violated openly. The courts are being told they lack the authority to enforce compliance.

International alliances built over 80 years are being threatened with tariffs because a president didn’t get the prize he wanted.

This isn’t governance. This is a systems administrator with root access, deleting backups in real time.

Whether by design or incompetence, the effect is identical: you can’t roll back to what you’ve destroyed.

The Function vs. The Institution

Here’s where my years in technology intersect with my years studying Bitcoin.

Every institution exists to serve a function. But over time, institutions develop their own interests, survival, growth, and power that diverge from the function they were created to serve.

The function of money is to facilitate exchange, store value, and coordinate economic activity across time and space.

The institution of fiat currency was supposed to serve that function. Instead, it’s been captured by those who benefit from its manipulation. The Cantillon Effect ensures that those closest to money creation benefit, while those furthest away bear the costs.

The function of American hegemony was collective security, open trade, stable rules, and a counterweight to authoritarian powers.

The institution of American leadership has now revealed itself as dependent on one country’s domestic politics — a catastrophic single point of failure that 80 years of alliance-building failed to account for.

When Europeans watched Americans elect this president twice, something shifted. Any future president who shows up saying “America is back” will be met with a simple question: “Until your next election?”

The institution failed. But the function still needs to be served.

Bitcoin as an Architectural Template

I’ve spent the years since 2019 writing about Bitcoin. Not because I think everyone should buy it (I’m not an investment advisor), but because Bitcoin represents something genuinely new in how we design systems.

What makes Bitcoin resilient isn’t ideology. Its architecture:

No single point of control. No CEO, no board, no president can change the rules unilaterally. Consensus is distributed across thousands of nodes worldwide.

Rules enforced by math, not trust. You don’t have to trust that the people running the system will behave honestly. The system’s constraints are encoded in the protocol itself.

Transparent operation. Every transaction is publicly verifiable. The system operates in the open.

The system serves its function regardless of any individual actor’s intentions. Bad actors can participate in Bitcoin. They just can’t break it.

Compare this to our current political architecture:

We have to trust that the president will respect norms. We have to trust that Congress will exercise oversight. We have to trust that the DOJ will enforce the law impartially. We have to trust that allies will be treated as allies.

Every one of those trust assumptions has been violated in the past month alone.

The president is not the United States.

I need to say that again because it’s the most important thing Americans and our allies need to understand right now. Millions marched in the “No Kings” rally; we fought a war of independence over this.

The president is not the United States.

The United States is home to 330 million people, 50 states, thousands of cities and towns, millions of businesses, and countless communities of faith, service, and mutual aid. It’s the bipartisan congressional delegation that flew to Copenhagen to tell the Danes, “We are your ally, we are not him.” It’s the prosecutors who resigned rather than invert justice. It’s the institutional relationships, military-to-military, intelligence-to-intelligence, business, that continue underneath the chaos.

Alliances are more important than personalities. Systems are more important than leaders. Functions outlast institutions.

The question isn’t how to put Humpty Trumpty back together again.

The question is: what do we build instead?

After the Fall

In my experience, you don’t fix a fundamentally broken system. You build its replacement.

You identify the essential function the old system was supposed to serve. You design a new architecture that serves that function better, with redundancy, with distributed control, with encoded constraints that don’t depend on trusting the right person to be in charge.

Then you let the old system fail on its own timeline while the new one proves itself.

This is what’s already happening with money. Bitcoin didn’t ask permission from central banks. It just started working, and it keeps working, and every year, more people and institutions recognize that a system with no single point of failure is more trustworthy than one controlled by politicians with short time horizons.

Can the same principles apply to security alliances? To governance? To the international order?

I don’t know. Those systems are messier than money. They involve judgment, context, and competing values that can’t be reduced to code.

But the principle translates: systems that depend on trusting the right person to hold power will eventually fail when the wrong person holds it.

Systems that distribute authority, encode constraints, and serve functions rather than personalities, those systems survive longer.

The Builders

I’m 73 years old. I’ve watched many systems fail. I’ve helped build a few that worked.

What I know is this: the people who matter most in moments of systemic failure aren’t the ones trying to reassemble the old order. They’re the ones designing what comes next.

The king’s horses and the king’s men are going to spend the next few years arguing about how to put the egg back together. Some will say we need a stronger wall. Some will say we need a better egg. Some will say it was the fall’s fault. Some will say there was no fall at all. Biden did it!

Meanwhile, the builders will quietly be working on something that doesn’t depend on eggs, walls, or kings.

I don’t know exactly what that looks like in terms of governance and security. But I know what it looks like in terms of money. And I know that the principles are the same:

Distribute control. Encode constraints. Serve the function. Don’t trust personalities.

Whatever comes after Humpty Trumpty won’t be a restoration. It will be something new.

The only question is whether we’ll be the ones building it or leave that work to others.