41 “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – SOCRATES E very year, I develop four scenarios of our society, our economy and our land- scape for the future designed to assist Solari subscribers in their strategic and invest- ment allocation planning for the coming year. During 2016, we produced a Solari Report with Eric Best: Scenario Thinking, to help sub- scribers learn more about the use of scenarios. The future is invented, not predicted. Prepar- ing for a variety of environments and future risks and opportunities and identifying the deepest trends and variables will help us “rock and roll!” At the end of 2016, I did a complete overhaul of our existing scenarios for the 2016 Annu- al Wrap Up which was published in January 2017. I said that the dominant “slow burn” scenario of the prior decade was over. We were moving into a period when the slow burn was accelerating and institutional changes are accelerating with it. This is exactly what happened. It will continue to happen and the pace will quicken in 2018. The US and G-7 leadership intend to keep the slow burn going. However, if you look at the speed of change resulting from the end of the debt growth model – from new technology and the global “productivity” backlash – the number of people protected economically are diminishing. Central banks and governments have used a great deal of their capacity to intervene and to subsidize. Pension funds, financial institutions and companies are engaging in liabilities de- struction or in what I call “controlled demoli- tions.” Governments are re-engineering their budgets, operations, and policies. For many people around the globe, changes in multiple areas will impact us all at once. The leadership wants to control more cash flows and related financial data so that they can guide the flow into government taxes, large financial institutions and the national security state. The struggle between forced centraliza- tion by multiple factions and cartels defending their fortunes and institutions and the power- ful economics of decentralization continues to move to a new level of intensity. We will use the same variables I chose for our 2017 scenarios : • Political and Economic Alignment: Unipolar vs. Multipolar: The primary debate in the US elections was whether or not our leadership would push to maintain a global empire or to sacrifice the empire in order to preserve North America. The North American faction won the election – but they continue unipolar military commitments and US alliances. Significant increases in the US military budget and tax reform indicate a significant effort to continue to explosive growth of a secretive national security state in North Amer- ica. If anything the dependency of the US economy on war is greater than ever. This is one of the reasons we are delighted that the Saker will be joining us again in 2018 for quarterly reports on The Emerg- ing Multipolar World. At the heart of the debate between a unipolar and multipolar world is the question of whether we will have a human culture or if we will contin- ue to shift to an inhuman, transhumanist culture. This is – by far and away – the most important variable of all. • Return on Investment to Taxpayers: Positive vs. Negative: The US federal budget and regulations have been designed to centralize control of the economy rather than to optimize the economy. The result has been a negative return on investment President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presiden- tial campaign button President Donald Trumps’s 2016 presiden- tial campaign hat