After Us, Then You
The national credit card and a federal government that has forgotten whom it serves
In 1969, John Lennon sang, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” Eleven years later, he was murdered. In the years since, the United States has spent roughly $45 trillion in today’s dollars on national defense.
Looking back, I sometimes wish Lennon had added one more line:
You won’t believe what war will cost.
A lyricist like Lennon I am not, but you get the point.
That number does not mean every defense dollar was wasted, or that military spending alone created our national debt. It simply tells us something about scale. When Washington decides that something really matters, it can find and spend enormous amounts of money for decades. Some of that money comes from people living now. Much of it is borrowed from people who will live later.
Last week, I wrote about the pattern After Me, Then You. Someone takes what he believes he needs in the present while everyone else is asked to keep carrying the burden. Their turn is always coming. They just need to wait a little longer.
At the federal level, it becomes After Us, Then You.
This week’s AMP session is The Shock Doctrine.
The Pattern in The Shock Doctrine
The film looks at what can happen when a crisis frightens and disorients people. Decisions are made quickly. Decisions are made quickly. Choices that would normally be questioned begin to look unavoidable. Before most people understand what is happening, those closest to power have secured what they want, and everyone else is left to live with the consequences.
The countries, leaders, corporations, and emergencies change. The pattern does not. A crisis arrives. Fear creates urgency. People are told there is no time for argument. Those with the most influence move first, while people with less power, and people not yet born, eventually get the bill.
The AMP session also notices something most of us have probably sensed. Spending on war is treated as a serious national responsibility. Spending on health, education, and other forms of human security is much more likely to be called wasteful, unaffordable, or dangerously close to socialism.
Then the debt grows, and the debt itself becomes the reason we are told those human needs must be cut.
This is not a pattern owned by one party. It has survived many presidents, many Congresses, and many national emergencies. It survives because it touches something deeper in us: our ability to enjoy the benefit now while pushing the responsibility somewhere we do not have to see it.
The National Credit Card
Economists call it deficit spending. Most people understand it more plainly as using a credit card.
Sometimes borrowing makes sense. A country may need to respond to a true emergency or build something that will serve people for generations. But borrowing does not make the cost disappear. The balance remains, interest accumulates, and somebody eventually has to pay it.
Washington presents each choice separately: a tax reduction, a defense bill, an emergency, a corporate incentive, an existing program that continues another year. But when the government does not collect enough to cover those choices, part of the cost is handed to someone else.
The current benefit arrives. The balance is passed forward.
Congress did not eliminate the cost. It changed the name on the envelope.
The real problem is not borrowing by itself. The problem begins when borrowing allows the people making the decision to receive the benefit without having to live with the repayment or the damage left behind.
That is a debt transfer. We get what we want now. Someone else deals with it later.
The Arrogant Trust-Fund Heir
The federal government increasingly behaves like an arrogant trust-fund heir.
The problem with an irresponsible heir is not only that he spends too much. It is that he has been protected from consequences for so long that he assumes the inheritance cannot run out. He mistakes what earlier generations built for proof of his own wisdom and treats maintaining the house as an unreasonable burden. If the roof leaks, borrow against the house. If the foundation cracks, refinance it. If the credit limit becomes inconvenient, raise it.
Cities usually cannot govern with that kind of distance. A city must care whether the roads work, the water flows, public safety responds, and people can still afford to live there. Residents see and feel what happens. They drive over the pothole. They lose water when the main breaks. They know whether the ambulance arrives.
Washington can spread the consequences across hundreds of millions of people, fifty states, and generations that are not yet here to object. It can keep doing this because the reckoning rarely arrives while the people making the decisions are still in charge.
Washington behaves like the trust-fund heir while many Americans feel like employees inside a heartless corporation. We supposedly own the institution, but management controls much of the agenda. We are told that hard choices must be made about health care, education, retirement, food assistance, and local services while the people nearest power protect their elections, donors, access, influence, and future careers.
The order quietly becomes: secure my position first, and then perhaps we will get to you.
How Much Say Do We Really Have?
We are told that elections are how we correct the pattern. They matter, of course, but our votes travel through a system that often weakens what the public actually wants.
Gerrymandered districts and partisan primaries can make the general election almost beside the point. Concentrated money buys access that ordinary voters cannot match. The Electoral College can produce a president who did not win the most votes nationally. The Senate gives every state two senators, whether that state has fewer than a million residents or nearly forty million.
That arrangement was created as a compromise between large and small states. But it also means Americans do not have equal representation per person in one of the two chambers that writes federal law and confirms judges and senior officials.
Our votes matter. But a great deal can happen to public consent before it becomes public policy.
Inside the Inheritance
I am not standing outside this inheritance. I have benefited from the stability, infrastructure, opportunity, public investment, and trust built by generations before me. Like many Americans, I have also enjoyed the comfort of assuming the country would remain intact. I assumed the people reaching its highest levels of wealth, fame, and power would understand that they were stewards of something larger than their own success.
You’d think those who received the greatest good fortune this country could provide would feel the deepest responsibility to preserve the system that made it possible. How could they allow it to rot beneath them?
No billionaire or corporation built the whole foundation beneath its own success. Markets depend on laws, courts, public credit, infrastructure, research, educated workers, stability, and trust. All of that was built over time by millions of people most of us will never know.
Yet those who have benefited most can begin to see taxes as theft, regulation as oppression, public investment as waste, and responsibility for the whole as somebody else’s burden.
They inherit the house and resent being asked to help maintain it.
Last week, the promise was After Me, Then You. At the national level, it becomes After Us, Then You. But once the inheritance itself is being depleted, the question changes:
After us, then what?
“Then you” suggests that someone eventually receives a functioning country. “Then what?” asks whether enough will remain to pass on.
Which Person Is Actually Richer?
A working person in Mississippi may earn and consume more than a comparable person in France. Presented one way, that settles the argument. The American has more money, so the American system must have produced the better life.
But the person in Mississippi may also be one bad MRI away from discovering both cancer and financial catastrophe. The person in France may earn less, but serious illness is far less likely to erase everything the family has built.
One may have more income. The other may have more security. Which person is actually richer?
A larger paycheck is not the same thing as a safer life. Prosperity also includes what can happen to us through no fault of our own: cancer, disability, job loss, a premature child, or a parent who needs years of care.
When Americans use the word socialism, they are often pulled into an ideological argument they may not even be trying to have. Many are not asking the government to own every grocery store or factory. They may be asking a much simpler question:
When is it our turn to receive some security too?
America has not rejected collective protection. It has decided which risks deserve it. We protect financial markets, strategic industries, defense contractors, international shipping, and the global order together. Many of the catastrophes ordinary people face are handed back to individuals and families to carry largely alone.
After Washington protects the system, then you.
Extractionocracy
This is where The Shock Doctrine connects to Extractionocracy.
Extractionocracy is not only about taking money. It is what happens when people with power get the benefit while someone else carries the financial, human, social, or environmental cost.
It does not require everyone involved to be cruel. It only requires the cost to stay far enough away that they do not have to feel it. Debt feels less real when someone else will repay it. War deaths feel less real when someone else receives the knock at the door. Medical insecurity feels less real when someone else skips the appointment or medication. The future feels less real because the people living there cannot vote yet.
The emotional groove is the same one we saw last week, only scaled from a family to a country: I will take what I need now, preserve the story that justifies it, and trust that someone else will absorb what follows.
What Is the Federal Government For?
So what is the federal government actually for?
It cannot do everything, and it should not try. But it also cannot keep treating military security as a national responsibility while catastrophic illness, technological change, environmental danger, and financial ruin are left almost entirely to families.
We need to decide which problems are simply too large for individuals, cities, states, or markets to carry alone. We also need to decide what we owe the people who come after us. Right now, we make those choices one crisis, one bill, and one election at a time. We rarely step back and ask what they add up to.
Seen together, the priorities often look like this: power now, human security later; benefits now, consequences later.
Seeing It When Our Side Benefits
It is easy to call something extraction when the other side does it. When our side benefits, we usually find a reason to explain it away.
I do it too.
We are quick to see greed, waste, favoritism, and abuse when the money or power is flowing toward people we oppose. When it flows toward a person, program, industry, or cause we support, the same behavior can suddenly look necessary, strategic, or justified.
That is part of what keeps the pattern alive. Recovering the country will require us to notice who receives the benefit, who carries the cost, and whether we would defend the same choice if the other party made it.
Why We Need a New Declaration
That is part of why I believe we need a new Declaration of Independence. Not because the principles of the original no longer matter, but because we have lost a shared understanding of what those principles require from a modern government.
What does consent of the governed really mean when money and political structures can distort public voice? What does liberty mean when one illness can destroy a family financially? What does responsibility mean when today’s leaders can create obligations for people who do not yet exist?
Declaration of Independence 2.0 is not another promise that someday our turn will come. It is an attempt to decide what the federal government owes its people, what it should leave to others, and how its power can once again answer to the people living with the consequences.
No president, political party, billionaire, corporation, expert, or artificial intelligence is going to do that for us. Simply putting our preferred side in charge of the same machinery will not be enough.
We will have to recover the country together. Not by pretending our differences do not matter, but by becoming willing to see the pattern no matter who benefits from it.
John Lennon asked us to give peace a chance. The bill is becoming harder to ignore.
After us, then what?
This AMP Is for You If…
You are disturbed by how easily war, debt, and crisis spending become normal.
You feel the federal government protects powerful institutions more reliably than ordinary people.
You worry that today’s benefits are being charged to future generations.
You want to recognize Extractionocracy even when your preferred party benefits from it.
You want a clearer and more humane understanding of what the federal government owes its people.
Step One: The Intention Session
The Shock Doctrine AMP session contains hundreds of belief statements designed to help unwind fear, helplessness, distrust, and the tendency to surrender our judgment during times of crisis. Subscribers will eventually be able to browse the full library. For now, the five Let Go and five Allow statements below offer a good sense of the session’s resonance benefits.
To experience the resonance of this AMP session, begin with the short Intention Session below. It helps align your body, mind, and emotions so you can receive the work in your own timing, with grace and ease.
You only need to complete the Intention Session once. If you have already done it for another AMP movie, it carries over and does not need to be repeated.
Speak These Aloud
I allow the changes in my timing and integrate only what I am ready for.
I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.
I am patient with myself as I make my changes.
I let go of feeling that I am too busy to take the time for this.
I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.
Engage Three Simple Modalities
Nod your head yes.
Drink some water.
Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.
Then watch The Shock Doctrine all the way through.
Do not force an insight or try to agree with every statement. Simply notice what stirs. Notice where you tighten and where you soften. Notice when fear makes something feel inevitable. Notice when you want a powerful person or institution to take control. Notice who feels like us, who feels like them, and who is left carrying the cost.
Here are some sample statements included in this AMP session.
Let Go
I let go of the belief that military security is the only kind of national security that matters.
I let go of overlooking extraction when my preferred side receives the benefit.
I let go of assuming that wealth and power naturally lead to stewardship.
I let go of treating another person’s catastrophe as a purely private failure.
I let go of the fear that caring for one another requires surrendering individual freedom.
Allow
I allow a clearer understanding of what the federal government is responsible for.
I allow prosperity to include both income and security.
I allow honest questions about who receives the benefit and who carries the cost.
I allow political structures that give the public a more meaningful voice.
I allow us to leave the next generation more than an unpaid bill.
About David
David Barnes is the co-creator of the Alignment Movie Process with Sue-Anne MacGregor and co-author of Taming Your Dragons: Making Peace With Your Emotions and It’s Just Commerce: Returning Balance to Business. His work explores emotional pattern recognition, human sovereignty, commerce, AI, and how stories can help people move beyond reactivity toward more mature, life-serving systems.
David also works with a framework that helps people and organizations identify the unseen emotional, cultural, and extraction-based patterns that shape what they build, what they optimize for, and what they miss.
To learn more about the Alignment Movie Process and explore how it works, visit AMP EXP.