The Universal Pattern
There exists a pattern so fundamental to power consolidation that it repeats across every domain of human activity, every culture, and every epoch. It is the progression from direct experience to institutional control, from source knowledge to intermediated access, from autonomy to dependence.
This is not conspiracy. This is not coordination. This is emergent behavior: when institutions discover they can insert themselves between individuals and sources of value—whether spiritual, medical, financial, or informational—they do so. The pattern is algorithmic. The outcomes are predictable.
Understanding this pattern provides extraordinary investment insight. Technologies that enable disintermediation—that remove barriers between individuals and sources of truth, healing, value, or knowledge—represent the highest-conviction opportunities in frontier markets. Not because they're "disruptive" in some vague sense, but because they attack the fundamental architecture of institutional power.
The Five-Stage Cycle
Across domains and centuries, the pattern follows the same sequence:
Domain Analysis: The Pattern Everywhere
Religious Experience
Stage 1: The mystic—Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, countless unnamed shamans and visionaries—experiences direct communion with ultimate reality. Their authority derives from personal gnosis, unmediated by institution.
Stage 2: They share their experience. Communities form around the practice. Early followers emphasize replicating the direct experience: meditation, contemplation, prayer as direct connection.
Stage 3: The experience gets interpreted into doctrine. The ineffable gets reduced to teachable concepts. Direct revelation becomes scripture requiring interpretation.
Stage 4: Organized religion emerges. Priests become necessary intermediaries between believers and God. Only authorized clergy can interpret scripture, perform sacraments, grant absolution. Direct mystical experience becomes suspect—even heretical.
Stage 5: The institution optimizes for its own perpetuation. Rituals replace experiences. Doctrines ossify. The church becomes political. The mystic's direct communion with source is now mediated through layers of institutional hierarchy, none of which brings the believer closer to the original experience—all of which extract resources and demand obedience.
Healing Knowledge
Stage 1: Community healers—overwhelmingly women—possess direct knowledge of herbs, birthing, wound care, nutrition. Their knowledge is empirical, passed through generations, refined through practice.
Stage 2: Healing knowledge spreads through apprenticeship and demonstration. Midwives train midwives. Herbalists share formulas. Communities develop sophisticated medical knowledge without institutions.
Stage 3: Medical knowledge begins formalization. Anatomy studied systematically. Healing practices codified. Universities form medical curricula.
Stage 4: Medical guilds demand licensing. The AMA forms. States criminalize unlicensed practice. Insurance companies dictate what constitutes "legitimate" medicine. Midwives, herbalists, folk healers are driven underground or eliminated. The witch trials were systematic destruction of competing healers.
Stage 5: Modern medicine optimizes for extraction, not healing. Pharmaceuticals that manage symptoms indefinitely are favored over cures. Insurance reimburses profitable interventions, not preventive care. Direct access to healing knowledge is suppressed. Patients are fully dependent on credentialed intermediaries who profit from perpetual treatment.
Money & Value Exchange
Stage 1: Direct exchange. Barter, then commodity money (gold, silver). Individuals hold and exchange value directly without intermediaries.
Stage 2: Goldsmiths offer storage services. They issue receipts for deposited gold. These receipts begin circulating as a convenience—still redeemable for gold on demand.
Stage 3: Banking practices formalize. Fractional reserve banking emerges. The receipts become more important than the underlying gold. Accounting standards develop.
Stage 4: Central banks form. Legal tender laws mandate use of state-issued currency. Gold ownership criminalized (U.S. 1933). Only licensed banks can create credit. All value exchange must flow through regulated financial intermediaries.
Stage 5: The system optimizes for rent extraction. Banks profit from every transaction. Central banks manipulate purchasing power through inflation. Negative real interest rates transfer wealth from savers to debtors and intermediaries. Direct peer-to-peer value exchange is impossible without institutional involvement. Individuals are fully dependent on financial system that extracts value at every layer.
Education & Knowledge
Stage 1: Direct knowledge transmission. Apprentices learn by doing alongside masters. Knowledge is demonstrated and practiced, not abstracted.
Stage 2: Successful craftsmen take multiple apprentices. Informal guilds form to maintain standards. Knowledge still transmitted directly through practice.
Stage 3: Formal schools emerge to systematize training. Curricula developed. Knowledge becomes abstracted into teachable units separate from practice.
Stage 4: Universities monopolize credential-granting. Degrees become legally required for practice. Self-taught practitioners delegitimized regardless of competence. Knowledge access mediated through institutional gatekeepers who control who may learn what.
Stage 5: Education optimizes for credential production and debt creation, not knowledge transmission. Student debt enslaves entire generation. Credentials signal institutional approval, not competence. Direct learning through practice is considered inferior to abstracted academic study. Knowledge access is paywalled behind tuition and accreditation systems.
Food Production
Stage 1: Families grow food directly. Knowledge of cultivation, preservation, preparation is universal survival skill.
Stage 2: Specialization enables exchange. Farmers sell surplus. Local markets form. Direct producer-to-consumer relationships.
Stage 3: Food production industrializes. Processing techniques standardize. Supply chains formalize. Economies of scale favor consolidation.
Stage 4: Agribusiness monopolizes production. Seed patents make saving seeds illegal. Food safety regulations require industrial infrastructure, eliminating small producers. Grocery chains become gatekeepers between producers and consumers.
Stage 5: Food system optimizes for industrial profit, not nutrition. Ultra-processed foods engineered for addiction. Monoculture farming depletes soil. Nutritional knowledge is lost. Home food production considered quaint hobby. Populations are fully dependent on industrial food system that optimizes for shelf life and profit margins while degrading both food quality and human health.
Birth & Death
Stage 1: Birth and death are community events. Midwives attend births at home. Families care for dying at home. Community rituals mark transitions.
Stage 2: Experienced midwives train others. Death doulas help families. Practices refine through generations. Knowledge remains embedded in community.
Stage 3: Hospitals formalize childbirth procedures. Funeral homes standardize death care. Medical protocols emerge.
Stage 4: Hospital birth becomes mandatory in many jurisdictions. Home birth criminalized or insurance-ineligible. Licensed funeral directors required by law. Community knowledge delegitimized.
Stage 5: Birth and death are medicalized, institutionalized, and monetized. Average hospital birth costs $15,000+. Dying alone in institutions becomes norm. Natural processes treated as medical emergencies requiring intervention. Families lose knowledge and capability to support their own transitions. Maximum extraction at life's most vulnerable moments.
The Underlying Mechanism
What drives this pattern? Three interlocking forces:
1. Concentration of Knowledge Creates Power
When few possess specialized knowledge, they acquire power over many. This creates incentive to restrict knowledge access while increasing demand for one's services. The medieval church's monopoly on literacy. Medical licensing that criminalizes unlicensed practice. Patent systems that privatize naturally-occurring compounds.
2. Recurring Revenue Requires Dependency
Solving problems permanently generates no ongoing revenue. Management of perpetual problems generates recurring income. A cured patient returns once. A chronically managed patient returns forever. A fully-paid mortgage ends the revenue stream. Refinanced debt perpetuates it. Institutional survival requires creating and maintaining dependence, not enabling autonomy.
3. Regulatory Capture Protects Incumbents
Established institutions write the regulations that govern their industries. These regulations ostensibly protect consumers but functionally eliminate competition. Licensing requirements make new market entry prohibitively expensive. Compliance costs favor large players. The result: regulations that claim to serve the public instead serve incumbents by preventing disruption.
Intermediation is not a necessary evolution—it is a power grab.
In every case, the shift from direct access to intermediated access does not make the underlying service better. It makes it more controlled, more expensive, and more dependent on institutional approval. The individual moves further from source knowledge while the institution moves closer to the revenue stream.
This pattern persists because it is profitable. Not for the end user—for the intermediary. The patient does not benefit from pharmaceutical dependency over natural healing. The borrower does not benefit from negative real rates. The student does not benefit from debt-financed credentials over direct apprenticeship.
But intermediaries benefit tremendously. This is why the pattern repeats: it is institutionally rational even when societally destructive.
Moving Away from Source
Perhaps most profound is what this pattern reveals about directionality: intermediation systematically moves individuals away from source rather than toward it.
The mystic seeks direct experience of the divine. Organized religion inserts priests between believer and God, moving the believer further from direct experience while increasing dependence on clerical interpretation.
The healer knows plants directly through observation and use. Modern medicine inserts layers of abstraction—pharmaceutical companies, insurance approvals, prescription requirements—moving the patient further from direct healing knowledge while increasing dependence on medical infrastructure.
The apprentice learns through direct demonstration and practice. Modern education inserts abstracted curricula, standardized testing, credentialing bureaucracies—moving the learner further from practical knowledge while increasing dependence on institutional approval.
In each case, the additional layers do not bring the individual closer to what they seek—enlightenment, healing, competence. They bring the individual further from source while bringing the institution closer to control.
This is not accidental. Direct access to source threatens institutional power. If believers can commune with God directly, why do they need priests? If patients can heal themselves with plants, why do they need pharmaceutical companies? If learners can gain competence through practice, why do they need universities?
The answer: they don't. Which is precisely why these paths are systematically suppressed.
The Psychedelic Case Study
We can observe this pattern forming in real-time with psychedelic medicine—a domain where indigenous shamanic practice is being "modernized" into medicalized psychiatry.
Stage 1 (Indigenous Use): For millennia, shamans and traditional healers facilitated direct experiences with plant medicines in ceremonial contexts. The experience itself was therapeutic. The shaman was guide, not gatekeeper.
Stage 2 (Western Discovery): Research in the 1950s-60s demonstrated profound therapeutic potential. Psychiatrists like Stanislav Grof conducted thousands of sessions. Knowledge spread through practice and publication.
Stage 3 (Criminalization): 1970s war on drugs criminalized psychedelics globally. Research halted. Shamanic practices delegitimized as "drug abuse." Direct access criminalized.
Stage 4 (Medicalization): Contemporary "psychedelic renaissance" proceeds entirely through medical framework. FDA approval pathways. Prescription requirements. Clinic-only administration. Therapist supervision mandated. Set and setting replaced by sterile medical environments.
Stage 5 (Current Trajectory): If pattern holds, psychedelic medicine will become another pharmaceutical dependency model. Recurring treatments in expensive clinical settings, administered by licensed professionals, reimbursed by insurance (at high cost), with direct access remaining criminalized. The therapeutic potential—which derives from the profound direct experience—will be diluted by medicalization while costs and dependencies increase.
We are literally watching the pattern unfold. Indigenous wisdom → Clinical trials → Regulatory approval → Prescription monopoly → Recurring revenue model. Each stage moves further from the source experience (direct encounter with profound states of consciousness facilitated by plants) toward institutional control and extraction.
Pattern Recognition Across Domains
| Domain | Source | Intermediary Layer | Extraction Mechanism |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spirit | Direct mystical experience | Priests, churches, theology | Tithes, indulgences, authority over salvation |
| Healing | Plant knowledge, midwifery | Doctors, pharma, insurance | Recurring treatments, drug dependency, procedure fees |
| Money | Direct value exchange | Banks, central banks, payment processors | Interest spreads, inflation, transaction fees |
| Knowledge | Apprenticeship, practice | Universities, credentials, publishers | Tuition, student debt, journal paywalls |
| Food | Growing, preparing | Agribusiness, processors, supermarkets | Markups on nutritionally degraded food |
| Information | Direct observation, reporting | Media companies, fact-checkers, platforms | Advertising, subscription, narrative control |
| Transitions | Community ritual for birth/death | Hospitals, funeral homes | Medicalized birth ($15K+), death industry ($9K+) |
The pattern is invariant. In every domain: source knowledge exists. Intermediaries insert themselves. Direct access is restricted or criminalized. Extraction begins. Individuals move away from source, toward dependency.
Investment Implications
Understanding this pattern provides profound investment insight. Technologies that enable disintermediation—that remove barriers between individuals and source—represent the highest-conviction opportunities because they attack the fundamental architecture of institutional power.
Bitcoin (Money): Removes banks from value exchange. Enables direct peer-to-peer transfer without intermediaries. Attacks the entire financial intermediation stack—central banks, commercial banks, payment processors, wire services. The suppression signal was (and remains) enormous precisely because Bitcoin threatens the most profitable intermediation system in history.
Decentralized AI (Computation): Removes tech oligopolies from access to intelligence. Enables direct deployment of AI capabilities without platform intermediaries. Threatens the emerging computational intermediation layer before it fully consolidates.
Direct-to-Consumer Diagnostics (Health): Removes doctors from self-knowledge. Enables individuals to understand their own biology without institutional interpretation. Continuous glucose monitors, at-home hormone testing, genetic analysis—all facing regulatory resistance precisely because they threaten medical intermediation.
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks / DePIN (Infrastructure): Removes telecom monopolies from connectivity, removes utilities from energy access. Enables direct peer-to-peer provision of infrastructure services. Helium (wireless), Filecoin (storage), energy microgrids—all threaten established infrastructure intermediaries.
Direct Primary Care (Medicine): Removes insurance from doctor-patient relationship. Direct subscription payment to physicians. Enables return to relationship-based medicine. Facing opposition from insurance industry precisely because it threatens their intermediation.
Homeschooling & Alternative Education (Knowledge): Removes universities from knowledge transmission. Enables direct apprenticeship and practice-based learning. Online courses, bootcamps, direct mentorship—all facing credentialing system resistance because they threaten educational intermediation.
Local Food Systems (Nutrition): Removes agribusiness and supermarkets from food access. Enables direct producer-consumer relationships. Community gardens, farmers markets, CSAs—all systematically marginalized by regulations favoring industrial agriculture.
Peer-to-Peer Lending (Capital): Removes banks from credit creation. Enables direct matching of savers and borrowers. Facing regulatory headwinds precisely because it threatens banking intermediation.
In each case: technology enables return to source by removing intermediaries. In each case: established interests oppose precisely because their power derives from intermediation. In each case: the suppression signal validates the opportunity.
The pattern of intermediation is the pattern of power consolidation. Across domains and epochs, the sequence is identical: direct access → community sharing → formalization → institutionalization → extraction and dependency.
This pattern persists not because intermediaries add value, but because they capture it. Each layer of intermediation moves individuals further from source while moving institutions closer to control and revenue.
Technologies that enable disintermediation represent our highest-conviction opportunities because they attack this fundamental architecture. They return power from institutions to individuals. They enable direct access to source knowledge, source healing, source value.
Bitcoin removes banks. Decentralized AI removes platform monopolies. Direct-to-consumer diagnostics remove medical gatekeepers. In each case, technology eliminates intermediaries who add cost while providing no value beyond access control.
The suppression signal is our primary alpha source because established intermediaries understand the threat. When central banks attack Bitcoin, when medical boards oppose direct-to-consumer testing, when telecom monopolies lobby against mesh networks—they reveal which technologies genuinely threaten their intermediation rent extraction.
Our investment process systematically identifies:
1. Which domains have the most rent extraction from intermediation (healthcare, finance, education top the list)
2. Which technologies enable return to direct access (distributed networks, direct testing, peer-to-peer platforms)
3. Which face the strongest institutional opposition (the suppression signal)
4. Which have achieved technical viability (can actually work today, not vaporware)
Where these four factors align, we invest. Not because we romanticize the past or oppose all institutions, but because we understand the mathematics: every layer of intermediation that adds cost without adding value is vulnerable to technological disintermediation.
The mystic's direct experience was real and powerful. Organized religion inserted itself between believer and divine, moving believers away from source while extracting tithes. The printing press partially disintermediated the church's knowledge monopoly. The internet further disintermediated access to information and community.
The pattern continues: identify profitable intermediation, build technology that enables direct access, face suppression from incumbents, win anyway as the efficiency gains are too large to suppress indefinitely.
Our task is simple: back the technologies that return individuals to source. The mystic, the healer, the community, the direct exchange—these weren't primitive. They were powerful. They were suppressed because they were powerful. Because they enabled autonomy rather than extraction.
Now, technology makes that autonomy possible again at scale. Our opportunity is to invest in its return.
Conclusion: The Direction Matters
The deepest insight from this pattern is about directionality. Intermediation doesn't bring us closer to what we seek—it moves us further away while extracting value.
The priest doesn't bring you closer to God—the mystic's direct experience does. The pharmaceutical company doesn't bring you closer to health—the herbalist's plant knowledge does. The university doesn't bring you closer to competence—the master's apprenticeship does.
Yet in each case, we've been convinced that we need the intermediary. That direct access is dangerous. That institutional mediation is necessary for our own good.
This is the lie that maintains power. The truth: source knowledge threatens intermediation revenue. Direct access threatens institutional control. Autonomy threatens dependency-based business models.
Technologies that enable return to source—to direct experience, direct knowledge, direct exchange, direct healing—are not stepping backward. They are stepping toward. Toward truth, toward autonomy, toward the thing itself rather than the institution claiming to represent it.
As investors, our opportunity is clear: identify the most profitable intermediation, find the technology that enables direct access, endure the suppression, win as efficiency and autonomy triumph over extraction and dependency.
The pattern is universal. The opportunity is enormous. The direction is toward source.
That is where we invest.