The Skimmed Individual

Wealth is stored energy, and the state is a grid that knows it. Notes on keeping your own power on while the system contracts.

Markus Maiwald25 Sept 2026

7 min read Layout

The argument, in brief

The German word for fortune, Vermögen, is the noun of a verb: to be able. Wealth is stored ability, stored energy; in money, in competence, in a network of people who answer when you call. A state in systemic contraction behaves like a grid under load: it cannot create energy, only skim it, and it skims harder the closer it stands to the wall. The signs are uniform across the West: exit taxes for leaving, ministers schemeing to tap idle savings, EU rules abolishing foreign accounts at banks without an EU branch, a French tax official selling the crypto-rich list to the mafia, with kidnappings following. The citizen's position in this arrangement is the livestock's position on the farm. The counter-move is an audit asked early, not late: what is actually mine, what is merely a claim on an institution, what do I hold in self-custody, what can I mobilize in a crisis, what must I learn now while learning is still cheap. Forethought costs less than aftercare; no plan survives contact, adaptability does. The door is the whole strategy: opacity by default, exit by design, possession by use. Whoever will not manage his own energy budget has already handed it to the grid.

The argument, in brief

Think today on tomorrow and on many days. For the cautious there are no accidents, and for the attentive no dangers. Do not postpone thinking until you stand neck-deep in the mire; it must happen in advance. The pillow is a silent oracle: to have slept on an undertaking beforehand is better than to lie sleepless over it afterward.

Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Wealth is stored energy

The German word for fortune is Vermögen, and it is the noun of a verb: vermögen, to be able. The language remembers what the investment brochures forgot. Wealth stores surplus energy from labor, luck or catastrophe survived, ready for the day you need to draw on it. It works as a battery rather than a pile.

That battery has three cells. Money holds the first: money, gold, bitcoin, the claim tickets you can carry. Competence holds the second: talents built out, skills acquired, the things your hands and head can do that others will pay for, barter for, or follow. Relationships hold the third: family, friends, a mesh of the like-minded, where the exchange rate of energy is something no central bank prints. A fortune is all three cells charged, because in a crisis the cells convert into each other or they are not charged at all.

Managing that battery means knowing what you can draw on and what can be taken from you.

Contraction, then extraction

We live inside a system change: a late democracy degenerating into an authoritarianism with a human face, its hieroglyphs already on the wall while the new system behind them is still being poured. The comfortable overlook what follows: a state in contraction does not relax its grip; it tightens it. The old powers mobilize every calorie left in the machine. Contraction of authority is followed by extraction of energy. It happens centimeter by centimeter, and financial freedom dies the way anything dies centimeter by centimeter: deniably. In wartime the pretense stops and all energy flows one direction, into the machinery.

You can read the direction in any newspaper, on any day. A little more control here, a little more transparency there; a new register; property taxes quietly raised. For those who want out: the exit tax, the toll booth on the door itself. Brussels meanwhile works on the savings of citizens, the famous lazy money sitting in accounts doing nothing, and wonders aloud how to route it into investments. First the incentives, then, if history is any guide, the war bonds. From 2027, EU citizens may no longer hold a foreign account at a bank without an EU branch; the perimeter fence gets a legal paragraph. And if you wonder what the state does with the data you entrust to it, France just answered: a finance ministry employee sold the list of the country’s largest crypto holders to the mafia. Raids and kidnappings followed. The founder of a French bitcoin company lost a finger to his captors.

Ask what you may safely tell the state about yourself, and the honest answer is now a data hygiene rule: nothing you would not hand a criminal, because that is occasionally the same recipient.

The farm

Strip the civics-class varnish and the relationship between citizen and modern state is the relationship between livestock and farmer. We are all on the farm together, and the farm is run on two iron rules.

The first rule is that the state has never created net energy. Individuals, alone or organised with others, generate, convert and produce the surplus. The state is a grid, and a grid only transports.

The second: the grid is engineered so that your energy never leaves it. Every gain you make is to be skimmed; every monetary loss you suffer is to be prevented, because a lossy battery is a battery someone else has to subsidize. Leaving means buying yourself free, then entering the next system, which has noticed and raised your arrival fee; the truly stubborn take up the perpetual traveler’s life and render themselves administratively homeless on purpose. The thermodynamic design has one goal: the citizen’s energy ideally never exits the state’s closed loop.

Sovereignty, against that, has a precise definition: control over your own energy budget. That budget decides your range of motion, your set of real options, your degree of self-command. The only open question, the one this century is busy answering, is whether technology becomes a liberation tool or a continuation of the farm by other means.

The audit

Protecting stored energy begins with an honest balance sheet before a crisis tests it:

What is actually mine right now? Registration and association are not ownership.

What is only a claim? A balance at a bank is a promise made by an institution, and promises are re-priced exactly when you need them most. A title in a registry is a line in a database maintained by the same organism doing the skimming.

What do I hold in self-custody? Keys in my hand, metal in my vault, skills in my body, documents under my roof. This is the cell that survives a registry outage, a bank holiday, a border closure.

What can I actually mobilize in a crisis? A drill tests access in a way a portfolio statement cannot. If you have never moved it, tested it, carried it, you do not own it; you supervise it for someone else.

What must I learn now? Of the things I will soon need, competence, jurisdiction, language, craft, which ones are still cheap to acquire this year? Learning is a market like any other, and its prices spike precisely when everyone discovers the shortage at once.

Marcus Aurelius located the control of a life largely in the control of one’s own thoughts, which is why the modern battlefield has extended into exactly that territory. State-corporate thought management is the keystone of the whole architecture: dominance over a man first immobilized in his options and then colonized in his head. Guard the inner cell like the outer ones.

Forethought

Gracián’s counsel stands because the economics underneath it stand: foresight is cheaper than aftercare. A thought spent on the future this evening costs minutes; the same lesson bought after the mire is at your neck costs years. The pillow is a silent oracle; sleep on the undertaking before it, so you are not sleepless over it after.

And there is a life after every system change. The only open variable is the energy level at which you live that life. Whoever refuses to lose options later must enlarge them now, because optionality, once lost to the grid, is bought back at panic prices if at all. Crisis has chaos in it by definition; the core competence is agility. No plan survives first contact; adaptation does. Adaptability must be built before contact, using the energy you still have now.

Whoever will not tend his own range of options at all has already surrendered his sovereignty; that is the one unconditional loss, and it is voluntary.

For everyone else, the race is open.

The door

The exit tradition answers this pattern with rules for privacy, possession and departure. Opacity by default: your data, your balances, your plans are nobody’s inventory. Possession by use: what you hold and use and can carry is yours; what a registry says about you is a claim, and claims get re-priced. And the door: the right to leave, with your energy and your reputation intact, is the single constraint that makes every other protection real, because a battery the grid can fence in is already the grid’s battery.

A state in contraction will read this essay as a manual for livestock. The farmer’s error is older than the farm: he believes the energy is his because he built the fence around it.

The energy was never in the fence.

Source: after Milosz Matuschek, “Die Befreiung des abgeschöpften Individuums” (CREDO newsletter, September 2026); rewritten and extended along the Exitarian axioms.