9 The Global Cycle

New Empires, Hegemony, and the Shifting World Order

Every civilization lives inside a myth.

For the past 500 years, the dominant myth of the modern world has been this: progress through expansion, stability through the nation-state, power through control. That myth, born during the European imperial age, is no longer collapsing—it has already ended. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 wasn’t just a geopolitical turning point. It was the closing bell of a 500-year global order.

As we move up the spiral from social, resource, and institutional cycles, next we have the global cycle, or the 500 year cycle of hegemonic powers and world orders, global economic systems, and the upcoming Human Design mutation or paradigm shift.

We are living through the collapse of a 500-year-old global system and the rise of something entirely new. What we are experiencing now is not the twilight of empire—but the dawn of a new one.

We have left the European age.
We are living in the spring of the North American age.

Just as feudalism gave way to capitalism and the modern state, we are now witnessing a shift toward decentralization, technological sovereignty, and the return of individual authorship. It is not the end of the world. It is the end of this world.

Let’s trace the arc.

The Basics of This Cycle:

• ~500-year global cycle

• Marks the rise and fall of hegemonic systems, empires, and economic paradigms

• Current cycle began ~1500s with European imperial expansion and the birth of global capitalism

• Now ending with the collapse of the nation-state model and the rise of decentralized, networked power

• Pluto return of the United States (248-year cycle) signals national transformation and empire evolution

• Historical parallels:
  – Fall of feudalism and the Church, rise of capitalism and the nation-state (~1450–1600)
  – Pluto in Aquarius (1778–1798): American and French Revolutions, constitutional governments, Enlightenment ideals

• 2023–2044: Pluto in Aquarius again—signaling a new era of sovereignty, technology, and collective reorganization

The Global Cycle

Much like how generations mark the social pulse, global cycles mark the civilizational heartbeat. We are in the very beginning of a new global cycle. The last cycle began in the wake of feudalism with the rise of industrial capitalism, the Enlightenment, and the nation-state. It matured through colonial empires and postwar hegemony. And now, it’s waning.

The signs are everywhere: institutional breakdown, ideological exhaustion, economic fragmentation, and the rise of alternative networks of power. The old myth—of nation, market, and mastery—is dissolving.

Immanual Wallerstein called it the "modern world-system"—a global architecture built on extraction, empire, and industrialization. Its founding myth? That human progress is linear, material, and best managed through centralized institutions.

This system delivered enormous technological and cultural growth—but it also sowed the seeds of its own destruction: ecological overshoot, financialization, and the erosion of meaning. Like all systems, it is not collapsing because it’s evil. It is collapsing because it is exhausted.

Empires rise. Empires overextend. Empires fall. It’s not failure. It’s a rhythm.

Since the 1500s, Atlantic Europe (Portugal, Spain, Britain, France) defined the world order through conquest, colonization, and commerce. But that era has passed. Power no longer orbits around Europe. The global center of gravity has shifted westward, and the geopolitical map has been redrawn.

North America—specifically the United States—now holds that center. With access to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, unmatched naval and technological supremacy, and a continental interior rich in agriculture, innovation, and resources, the U.S. didn’t just inherit the global system—it became its new architect.

Today, we are watching that rhythm repeat—though never in exactly the same way. This time, we aren’t replacing one empire with another. We are shifting from hegemonic control to networked emergence.

The North American Age

Just as feudal Europe gave way to industrial capitalism, and monarchies gave way to nation-states, we are now transitioning into something entirely new that is still forming.

Historically, these cycles unfold in distinct phases:

• A founding moment or technological rupture (navigation, printing press, industrialization)

• A rapid expansion of trade, empire, and ideology

• The centralization of power into global institutions

• A period of overreach, stagnation, and ideological rigidity

• And finally, a systemic crisis that births the next world order

The last major cycle began in the late 1400s, as Atlantic European powers used naval dominance, colonial expansion, and capital accumulation to construct the first planetary system of control. This was the European imperial age—what Wallerstein called the “modern world-system.” It was global. It was extractive. It lasted for half a millennium.

That cycle ended in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union. The European empires were gone. The Cold War was over. And for the first time in 500 years, the center of world power was no longer in Europe.

It had shifted west.

American Hegemonic Power

Many believe we are witnessing the fall of American power. But from the longer POV, America is not the final empire of the old world order—it is the first of the new one.

The 21st century is the first geopolitical century shaped not by Europe, but by post-European realities:

• Transpacific trade now rivals and outpaces transatlantic trade.

• Digital, decentralized networks bypass traditional state power.

• Global conflict is no longer just territorial; it is economic, cultural, technological, and psychological.

• Population collapse, not growth, will define the century.

This is not a continuation. This is a reset.

America’s rise over the last 80 years was not due to ideology, purity, or divine right. It was due to geography, strategy, and timing.

Like all great powers, the U.S. is now acting to protect its position by disrupting potential coalitions, maintaining global naval dominance, and investing in next-generation tools of warfare (space, AI, biotech). The American strategy, as George Friedman puts it in his book The Next 100 Years, is not to win wars—but to prevent challengers from cohering.

We aren’t watching the U.S. collapse. We’re watching it mature…awkwardly, messily, and defensively. Like a global adolescent unsure of how to wield its power.

America’s Pluto Return

Overlaying this 500-year cycle is another potent clock: the Pluto cycle, which runs roughly every 248 years. Pluto governs death, transformation, power, and rebirth…archetypal forces that align strikingly with periods of institutional collapse and civilizational reinvention.

The United States is currently undergoing its Pluto Return, a rare and disruptive transit in which a nation faces its shadow, its karma, and its potential to either reform or decay. The last time Pluto was in this part of the sky—1778 to 1798—the American republic was being born, and the global order was dramatically shifting.

That period was marked by:

• The American and French Revolutions, which shattered the legitimacy of divine kingship

• The birth of constitutional governance, secularism, and Enlightenment rationalism

• The first real emergence of individual rights as a foundational myth

• A reorganization of power away from hereditary monarchies and toward market-driven states

Pluto re-enters Aquarius from 2023 to 2044—a long, slow grind that invites not just institutional collapse, but a total rewiring of how we think about authority, systems, and the soul of civilization.

The last Pluto-in-Aquarius cycle gave us the modern democratic experiment.
This one is giving us something new: sovereign emergence, decentralized technology, emotional intelligence, and a return to spiritual agency.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

What the new Global Cycle means

We are no longer living at the end of the European world order. We are living at the beginning of something else entirely.

Since 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the world has been quietly exiting a 500-year cycle (the European Age) and entering a new geopolitical epoch. One no longer defined by empires of conquest and nation-state alliances, but by something more fluid, decentralized, and radically unformed. This is the spring of the American global cycle, and like all springtimes, it is chaotic, creative, and unresolved.

The 21st century won’t be marked by the fall of empire. It will be marked by the redistribution of power away from legacy institutions and toward something more networked, nimble, and strange.

The Collapse of Ideological Consensus

Capitalism. Democracy. Communism. Socialism.

For the past two centuries, these were the grand narratives of modernity. They gave structure to our economies, identities, and wars. They were belief systems that felt like facts. You could rally a nation around them (or destroy one with them).

But now, these ideological titans are cracking because they are no longer coherent. They no longer inspire. They no longer unify. They have become exhausted scripts. Isms that mostly serve as distractions and fodder to bicker about.

What’s rising in their place are new, liminal frameworks that more fluid and experimental than fixed or prescriptive. The “wild west” slash springtime energy of a new global cycle. For example:

• Peer-to-peer governance

• Digital identity

• Open-source spirituality

• Networked economies

• Self-initiated sovereignty

These aren’t ideologies in the traditional sense. They’re prototypes…bridges between the old and new being built in real time.

From Citizen to Sovereign

Perhaps the most profound shift of all is how we understand identity and power.

In the European age, identity was defined by institutions: nation, church, party, class. You were a citizen—a participant in a collective myth, beholden to state structures for legitimacy, security, and belonging.

But now, something quieter—but more revolutionary—is happening:
We are moving from the obedient citizen who focuses on the good of the tribe to a sovereign, authentic individual expression.

This is very much in line with the shift of smaller cycles (social, resource, institutional) as well as bigger cycles (age of aquarius, etc). Similarly, in 2027 we enter a major energetic shift from the Cross of Planning into the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix. For the past 400+ years, humanity has lived under the Cross of Planning, a tribal, institutional frequency that prioritized systems, bargains, and collective stability. It supported the rise of governments, religions, healthcare, and educational systems…basically everything we associate with the modern world. But that era is ending.

The Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix initiates a new frequency: individual empowerment, emotional authenticity, and personal sovereignty. It is no longer about fitting into collective structures. It’s about awakening from within. The Phoenix energy doesn’t offer safety; it demands transformation. It’s fierce, embodied, purpose-driven, and feminine. As institutions crumble and ideologies unravel, this transit invites each of us to rise—not through external validation, but through internal alignment and creative ignition. It is the energetic backbone of the sovereign age. **This theory comes from Human Design, a cosmological framework that maps energy mechanics.

This is the rise of the Sovereign Individual—not as a lone wolf or bootstrapping American dreamer, but as a self-authored, community-connected force of evolution. This sovereignty is spiritual, psychological, and relational. It’s about taking full authorship of your life, while honoring the ecosystems that make life possible.

Multipolarity and the End of Empire

As the ideological consensus breaks and identity fractures into self-organizing nodes, something else becomes visible: no one is in charge anymore.

American hegemony isn’t vanishing, it’s just becoming something else. Instead of global dominance through traditional warfare, the U.S. now plays a defensive role in a world increasingly shaped by decentralized power.

This is what future multipolarity might look like:

• No single empire rules.

• Power is distributed across networks, alliances, and emergent coalitions.

• Influence moves faster than bureaucracy—and often without permission.

• Decentralized technologies (AI, crypto, bioengineering) leapfrog state control.

The New Cycle

The European age, with its myths of conquest, order, and empire, is over. The structures it built, focused on nation-states, ideological blocs, institutional authority, have reached the end of their arc. The center no longer holds because the story has unraveled. The global myth that once unified the modern world has lost its power to inspire.

We are witnessing the early stages of the American age, not in the sense of nationalism, but in the sense of geography, timing, and energetic placement in the global order. North America is the new gravitational axis not because it is perfect, but because it is positioned—strategically and energetically—to lead the next global cycle.

But this is not a descent into chaos. It’s the spring of a new global cycle. A new pattern, a new myth, a new configuration is emerging. Does this all sound wacky and destabilizing? Yeah, sure does. But that’s because we haven’t seen it yet. All we know is what has been, and those rules no longer necessarily apply. We know what archetypes are coming by the way they will play out is still up to free will.

Right now it feels as if we are straddling two timelines. One clings to control: AI surveillance, technocratic optimization, central bank digital currencies, behavioral management. The other leans into emergence: decentralized creativity, spiritual agency, self-organized governance, local resilience. Both are real. Both are happening. And each of us is choosing which world we invest in—with our attention, our energy, our values.

We are in the moment between myths. The previous cycle still so alive in our memories and institutions. The new cycle is also real but in a way that is less tangible and more up for debate and speculation.

At the heart of this cycle turnover is the rise of the sovereign individual. Not the isolated self, but the coherent self. The emotionally honest, intuitively guided, internally resourced being who no longer waits for a system to validate their worth or explain their purpose.

Til next time,

Marissa

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