Yesterday I wrote to you about language, meaning, and the quiet collapse unfolding beneath our feet. Many of us feel it:
the thinning of meaning,
the speed that outpaces our emotional and symbolic capacities,
the sense that the vocabulary that once held us is no longer strong enough to contain this moment.

Today, I want to extend that reflection into the terrain of governance, because the erosion of meaning is not only personal or cultural. It is reshaping the structures that hold public, communal, and institutional life together.

When meaning erodes, governance erodes.

Governance—civic, organizational, communal, or institutional—depends on shared symbolic foundations:

• a common understanding of the common good,

• a collective sense of responsibility,

• shared expectations of leadership,

• a shared meaning of harm and repair,

• and a shared orientation toward the future.

When these foundations weaken, governance rarely collapses loudly.
It collapses quietly:
through mistrust,
through incoherence,
through leaders who can no longer interpret what is happening,
through institutions that lose their sense of purpose,
through communities that cease to recognize themselves.

This is where Poetic Futurism becomes essential.

Poetic Futurism is an architecture for public life.

It is a meaning-centered methodology that rebuilds the inner scaffolding leaders and communities need to navigate a world changing faster than our symbolic systems can process.

Poetic Futurism offers four guiding questions:

• What must we remember?

• How must we relate?

• What can we imagine?

• What will we design?

These are governance questions.
They are healing questions.
They are economic questions.
They are future questions.

Enter the Poetic Economy.

Traditional economic models—capitalist, socialist, market-based, neoliberal, restorative,  regenerative, solidarity—focus on resources: how they move, how they are distributed, how they are repaired, or how they are exchanged.

The Poetic Economy shifts the foundation entirely.
And I want to say this clearly: the Poetic Economy is not a metaphor.
It is not symbolic language.
It is not an image or a poetic device.

It is a real economy.
A concrete economic architecture.
A different way of understanding value, stability, and the health of a society.

The Poetic Economy recognizes that:

• meaning is a form of capital,

• coherence is infrastructure,

• relationship is productivity,

• imagination is resilience,

• and dignity is stability.

While other models track material flows, the Poetic Economy tracks the health of the symbolic and relational world—the world that makes any economic or political system possible.

Healing and governance meet inside the Poetic Economy.

Our systems fracture when:

• leaders lose interpretive clarity,

• institutions confuse purpose with performance,

• people lose trust in one another,

• communities stop sharing a symbolic world.

Yes, these are governance failures—
but underneath them, they are healing failures.

The Poetic Economy reminds us that:

• meaning is a public good,

• relational trust is civic infrastructure,

• imagination is a governance tool,

• and coherence is the condition that allows any system to function.

Healing is not separate from governance.
Healing is what makes governance possible.

This is the work Poetic Futurism was created for.

To create coherence inside people,
inside institutions,
inside public life,
and inside the economies that shape how we live and relate.