The Pendulum Swings: From Docility to Sovereignty in the Age of Oil Shocks and Golden Resets
March 10, 2026 by elainedianetaylor~
The Swing
The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil just jumped, fell down and is rising again. Recession odds are flirting with 41% on the prediction markets, and gold has climbed back near its all-time highs at around $5,225 an ounce. All while tokenized versions on blockchains are seeing their own rush as more learn how to use the new technology.
The headlines scream chaos, but if you step back, you see the pendulum swinging again, right on schedule.
The Pendulum of Power moves through three phases—docility, discipline, and sovereignty. We’ve spent years deep in docility, floating inside a soap bubble of fiat illusion, digital distraction, and endless media narratives that keep the crowd soft and compliant.
Humans yielded without question because the system “worked” enough for those getting older to feel enough progress to not fight it. Then the shocks arrived—geopolitical flames, energy choke points, market vertigo—and discipline begins to clamp down.
Rules tighten, fear sharpens focus, media directs opinion to receive fear, so citizens will allow enforcement to stay safe, systems enforce compliance through necessity rather than seduction. But discipline is never the end state.
The push to control burns hot and fast, and out of that fire comes the swing toward sovereignty: where individuals and nations reach again for what endures—gold, silver, the richest intelligence of all—assets that carry history in their weight, poetry in their shine, wildness in their refusal to be fully tamed.
Gold in the hand has no counterparty risk.
The big players park capital where it gives yield or safety as the business cycle swings. But big players don’t keep their money in one country; their capital moves around the globe.
As long as the money stays still it can be controlled by the powerful. But if there’s a new digital system, Bitcoin or other digital assets or cryptocurrencies, that can cross borders without restriction or time delays, then the current fiat system can have colossal capital flight, that is faster and larger than at any time in history.
The more unstable the system, and the closer to collapse, the more the individual will be on the edge of their seat ready to move capital away from the place that’s collapsing.
The more those in power need to smash the individual and control the movement of people and money.
Where do the world elite put there money in these unstable times?
In US dollars, US shares, US Treasuries and into physical gold stored in the US.
Value and energy moves to the hub of the wheel to keep the system’s heart beating.
The other nations, emerging nations, will fall first as the capital flees to safety.
Then there are new decentralized systems, using new technology, that are rising on the new edges of this wheel of the world. And the cycle spins again and the pendulum swings back.
ROME
Look back to Rome in the third century, when the empire was bleeding from debasement.
The silver denarius went from nearly pure to a whisper of metal, and prices spiralled.
Diocletian tried freezing everything with edicts and control; the classic discipline phase. It held for a short time, then cracked.
Constantine stepped in later with the gold solidus, a coin so steady it lasted centuries, anchoring sovereignty when illusions finally collapsed.
The pattern is the same: debase the medium, inflate the bubble, enforce the discipline.
Then we watch the pendulum arc toward what cannot be printed or promised away. The people don’t trust anything but themselves.
The frame of thinking changed, and it causes those in the middle time to be conflicted in their very thoughts. If people are feeling that things are speeding up, change is happening so fast, they’re nervous system can’t settle, and they’re uncertain. This is it. We are at that break point where the pendulum is at the moment before the swing back.
Those living between the decentralized aural age and the age of the printing press and alphabet were there. The village was the sound of life where communication was all ways at once. The book is one message, from one party to many, but absorbed individually without a reply. That was brand new.
The message in the book became frozen in time in one direction. From one-to-many.
That is the time where the author was noted and remembered. Before that time the handwritten manuscripts were anonymous, attributed to God.
After that time there became the idea of legacy, of being famous, that your name would live on into the future.
The decentralized system, as the internet or some new digital finance, is many-to-many.
And so the many became fractionalized and de-personalized. It was the precursor to a sense of patriotism, a sense of nation, a soldier.
The person became a replaceable widget, as if a human is a letter in a Gutenberg press.
Village life had roles, the centralized system has jobs.
Today’s oil shock is our modern debasement signal, our inflation flare-up in energy terms. Gold is responding not with noise, but with presence.
History and Communications Gurus
Carroll Quigley saw this trajectory in Tragedy and Hope—civilizations cycle through expansion, institutional capture and then decay, always with instruments of power (banks, media, money itself) shifting hands until the old order crumbles.
This is the shift from the gardeners planting and the managers then dividing a shrinking pie after the creators die.
We’re watching that institutional decay accelerate now; the oil-gold dance is one more marker that the elite tools are losing grip, opening space for a reset toward structures more aligned with reality.
Elias Canetti, in Crowds and Power, described how fear turns crowds into something manipulable, how survival symbols (resources, money, the next meal) become the stings that transform passive masses into a directed force for the benefit of the elite managers.
The 2026 panic around oil is that sting in real time—crowd docility flipping to a controllable frenzy.
Yet gold, held personally, breaks the crowd spell. It’s the individual counter-sting, the thing that lets a person step out of the stampede and reclaim direction.
Marshall McLuhan reminded us that the medium is the message. This means that the medium, the “thing” or channel used to deliver the message, is more important in value that the content being moved. The medium IS the message. It determines how we receive the message or value, what we think about at all, what we value, how we see space and time and power and connections to others, and the frame we live inside.
Are we used to just receiving the message in a direct one way direction? Yes. Yes, we are. That is what mainstream media is all about.
Traditional mainstream news is hot, blasting fear and narrative in high definition, keeping us docile inside the spectacle. It was even called the “hypodermic needle” approach.
It tells you what is coming at you. It tells you WHAT is coming AT you.
It tells you that you are able to respond but you are not a creator. That is centralized power and messaging and worldview inside a centralized system.
In a decentralized frame you see that message as one viewpoint, you add your own viewpoint and many others add back and forth, and it blends and co-creates a frame going forward. The frame itself is dynamic. You plan and execute your individual plan inside that developing and changing frame as a sovereign individual.
You are part of the creation.
You are not just waiting for a manager in a pie world to tell you what size slice of something you are allowed to receive.
Blockchain-tokenized gold is cooler medium, a way that is participatory, an extension of self where you hold keys, not promises.
It’s that inbetween way of being sovereign inside a developing new system. It depends on the new community, a counterparty risk, while having advantages of a new system where the capital can move almost instantly across the globe for almost pennies.
In McLuhan’s global village, this is the reclaiming medium: quiet, sovereign, letting the individual message to the collective rather than the other way around.
So here we are, March 2026, with world powers jostling for position in a fluid dynamic. The elite players are not just nations. They are the ones controlling nations with blackmail, money, favors, deception.
But the pendulum doesn’t ask permission; it swings.
Systems repeat, and pendulums of societies swing, because humans in groups do the same things given the same situations. Any time in history.
Even now.
Watch the patterns in the medium—oil, headlines, price action—and consider what benefits while it lasts.
Disruption is coming, so gold, silver, defense, space, technology.
Active docility means seeing clearly, attaching lightly to what serves, then releasing when the wind shifts. It means harnessing the wind to ride out and then be safe from a storm.
Gold in its full breadth — historical, poetic, wild, sovereign, physical, metaphorical — is the richest intel you can carry through the turn.
Holding something that endures through history’s war and peace cycles, helps the swing toward sovereignty feels less like crisis and more like homecoming.
Elaine~
Keys: gold, oil, sovereignty, debt resets, war, economic collapse, globalism and nationalism
Songs for today: “Coins and Crowns” unplugged, featured in Mike Maloney’s episode 1 New Secrets of Money viral series on YouTube.
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Mike Maloney’s Hidden Secrets of Money:
- Hidden Secrets of Money – Full Series on YouTube (opens in new tab)
- Direct link to Episode 1 – Currency vs Money (the one that features “Coins and Crowns” unplugged): Over 6.8 million views
- Episode 1 – Currency vs Money (opens in new tab)
Elaine Diane Taylor on X @ ElaineDTaylor
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Thank you to Jim Rickards for including me in his New York Times bestselling book The New Case for Gold.
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Nothing on this site is intended as investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Gold is at historic highs because trust in government and legacy systems is at historic lows.
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Elaine – Barkerville, Gold Rush Town, British Columbia, Canada
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Thank you to Mike Maloney for including my song Coins and Crowns in Episode 1 of his bestselling YouTube series Hidden Secrets of Money.
Coins and Crowns
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
SOCAN/ASCAP
from the album Coins and Crowns
Coins and Crowns is featured in Episode 1 of Mike Maloney’s bestselling series Hidden Secrets of Money.
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Not Much of a Holiday (Bank Holidays and Media Persuasion)
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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A Terrible Breeze (War and Social Media)
The news comes down
A little (X) bluebird sings
Words of war
Fire and furious things
Of testing might
‘Til no patience knows
If keeping still
Still keeps you safe at home
There’s a terrible breeze
They speak of today
Of threats that used to live a world away
We all know wind
Can blow both ways
And a terrible breeze can blow it all away
A worldwide net
Sees our village grow
Until we all forget
What each one used to know
How a blind bird’s wings
Can reach the shore
And turn the wheel of peace and war
Village fools sinking down, down, down
Debt and gold wound in numbered shrouds
Deal of a life it’s bread and clowns
Can we afford another go around?
The news comes down.
It’s a terrible breeze. The news comes down.
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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Preparing for the Fall is a live boutique album available for digital download — featuring Wag the Dog, Black Swan Dive, American Pie and Gods of the Copybook Headings. Also available on iTunes, Google Music, Amazon Music and major digital distributors.
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The Gods of the Copybook Headings
words by Rudyard Kipling and music by Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Preparing for the Fall.
The copybooks of the early 1900s gave us all the wisdom we need. The sayings that were copied are the truths, the gods of our world. All the empires who followed the gods of the marketplace have fallen, and there’s terror and slaughter when the gods of the copybook headings return. The lyrics are by Rudyard Kipling. One of my gurus.
Another Week on Wall Street
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Coins and Crowns.
“A little grease (Greece) is floating out to sea, and little pigs (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are bobbing up and down, they’ll send a storm and we’ll see, when the tide goes out who’s naked on the beach“. The world is changing as we know it.
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Nothing on this site is intended as individual investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Elaine Diane Taylor 
