The Magnetic Paths of Power and Trauma
The spark
This essay started with a YouTube lecture.
On the screen, Professor Jiang stands at a blackboard and calmly explains "how they control the world." He is not talking about lizard-people or cartoon conspiracies. He is talking about something stranger and more ordinary: the way systems of finance, intelligence, and religion organise human beings into patterns; how elites are trained to carry out the will of those systems; how trauma is part of the training.
He uses ancient Egypt as one of his images. The pharaoh has to be treated as a god, he says, but under the crown there is just a human child. So how do you turn that child into a god-king? His answer is not only ritual and theatre, but psychological engineering: early experiences that shatter the ordinary sense of self and replace it with a role.
Whether or not every historical detail is correct, the underlying idea hit me with force. It echoed things I've seen in families and institutions, and in myself: the sense that our lives often follow tracks that were laid before we arrived.
Magnetic families
A family is not just a set of individuals sharing a roof. It is an invisible architecture that wants to keep its shape. Long before a new child is born, there are currents already flowing: grief that was never spoken, pride that must be defended, secrets, loyalties, unhealed injuries.
When the child appears, those currents organise around them like a magnetic field. The first-born son may be pulled into the role of heir or saviour. The first daughter might become the caretaker, the diplomat, the one who manages everyone's feelings. Another child might be pushed into the role of rebel or ghost.
No one sits down and assigns these roles on paper. The system does it. Someone has to preserve the family image. Someone has to absorb the anger. Someone has to be "the one who doesn't cause trouble." The patterns existed before any of the children knew their own names.
From inside, this can feel like personality: "I'm just the responsible one," or "I'm the difficult one." From outside, it looks more like choreography.
Trauma as a delivery system
Trauma is one of the main ways this choreography gets written into the body.
Trauma can be obvious: violence, sexual abuse, war, addiction. It can also be quiet: a parent who is physically present but emotionally unreachable; a house where love is always conditional; a constant sense that any mistake will bring humiliation.
The nervous system adapts. A child learns to disappear, to explode, to please, to watch everything, to take the blame, to blame everyone else. Those strategies work at the time; they help the child survive. If nothing ever interrupts them, they become automatic.
By the time that child is an adult, the strategies feel like part of their nature. "I'm just someone who can't trust." "I always ruin things." "I never need help." Underneath those sentences is an older story: "There was a time when it wasn't safe to do anything else."
The tragedy is that trauma flows downhill. A person who was humiliated tries to avoid their own humiliation, and in doing so may humiliate others. Someone who learned to control everything to stay safe may control their children to the point of breaking them. The system doesn't just remember; it repeats.
The narrow corridor of real freedom
None of this means that individuals are helpless puppets. It does mean that our freedom exists within a corridor, not an open field. Part of that corridor is built from our family history and personal trauma. Part of it is built from social structures, economic necessity, and political power. Part of it is built from the hidden programs our own brains run in the background.
Real freedom starts when we begin to see the corridor.
That might mean recognising that the "difficult child" in a family is carrying everyone's unspoken pain. It might mean noticing that the leader we admire is successful precisely because they can ignore suffering that would disturb us. It might mean catching ourselves, at the edge of some invisible fence, and asking, "Whose voice is this, really, telling me I can't go further?"
Awareness doesn't magically erase the magnets. But it does allow us to lean against them differently. We can refuse to dump our hurt onto the next generation. We can step out of some inherited roles, even if only a little. We can choose not to worship the god-kings of our time, or to feed their systems with our unthinking obedience.
Maybe that is the real work: not to find the perfect leader or the perfect system, but to become slightly less programmable ourselves. To feel what previous generations could not afford to feel. To say, quietly and stubbornly, "This part of the pattern stops with me."
– Professor Jiang Xueqin's "Predictive History / Prof Jiang Explains" lectures on YouTube (finance, trauma and power).
– Research on automaticity and unconscious behaviour in social psychology (for example, work by John Bargh and colleagues).
– Work on intergenerational trauma and epigenetics (trauma effects echoing across generations).
– Studies of psychopathy, narcissism, and leadership in corporate and political life.
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