Behind the founding myth of the Westward Expansion lies a far less romantic truth: it was often a desperate migration of society’s outcasts. Unemployed men with no future, families crushed under debt, the persecuted looking for refuge — all were rebranded as “pioneers,” dressing up a harsh reality of flight rather than conquest.
Whenever production outpaces consumption, surplus follows. To offload the excess, people are encouraged to buy on credit — in other words, to go into debt. But that debt, inevitably, becomes unmanageable. Then come the bankruptcies, which, paradoxically, help the system reset: debts are recycled*, pulverized, erased, assets devalued, and a fresh cycle of borrowing and spending begins.
This is the hidden engine of our modern economy: a cycle of overproduction, credit dependency, and collapse. It’s a loop built not on balance, but on instability — propped up by the illusion of prosperity. And it’s this very loop that has always propelled the push Westward, toward lands supposedly rich, fertile, and full of promise. Toward an Eldorado — but one too often built on the backs of those who arrive too late or with too little.
Today, this “race to the West” is no longer just geographic. It’s symbolic. The West, or the so-called ‘Occidental’ world — from the Latin occidere, “where the sun sets” — still carries a double meaning: a place of wealth and power, but also the fading echo of a colonial order. The poor of the Global South, driven by poverty or war, still flock toward this West they resent — and yet still associate with survival, even hope. They flee what they reject… heading straight toward what they distrust.
But now, the direction is reversing. It’s no longer the poor who are fleeing, but the rich who are leaving. A mobile, fluid elite sets up home wherever money flows more freely: the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Singapore, Hong Kong… ultraliberal enclaves with light taxes, minimal state presence, and few social or environmental constraints.
This new exodus isn’t a gold rush — it’s an escape from reality. The ultra-wealthy are no longer interested in reshaping the world. They want out. They build bubbles — sanitized havens, detached from chaos — while the rest of the world scrambles for stability within a system that offers little more than illusion.
* Debt recycling is the latest fashion in our parasitic economy. Enter a new breed of vampires: the NPL investors. Operating globally, they scoop up bundles of “written-off” or hopelessly delinquent debt for a pittance — cents on the dollar. Think of them as the scrap merchants of finance: scavengers who profit from financial ruin. Through “legal” (often skirting the edge of the lawful), data-driven, or aggressive collection methods, they manage to squeeze a few drops of value from the wreckage. Their business model? “We buy trash for nothing, shake it hard, and once in a while, a few coins fall out.”
