When Things Fall Apart

The Trust That Holds when Thinks Knit Again

There’s a stanza from W. B. Yeats that has echoed for a century whenever societies unravel:

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." - W. B. Yeats

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart quotes Yeats well above and opens with a rift … a rupture not just of political control, but of memory, coherence, and trust. His story traces the unraveling of a living social system under the weight of colonial intrusion … not simply the arrival of outsiders, but the erasure of an entire relational logic that once held communities together.

It’s a rupture that still echoes. Not just in Nigeria. Not just in Africa. But across the entire human experience. Because what Achebe captured wasn’t just a historical moment … it was the deep violence of disconnecting a people from their own protocols for coordination, care, and reciprocity.

That rift is still happening. It happens every time a community is told that trust doesn’t count unless it’s backed by money. That relationships aren’t reliable unless formalized by expensive regulated contracts. That coordination must be managed by platforms, institutions, or markets …. not by memory, promise, and collective intelligence.

Yes and …. deep breath.

Here's the truth I keep returning to …. too big for a sentence, too alive for a single article:

The most resilient systems don’t prevent failure. They survive because they know how to repair trust when it breaks.

People often assume that when I speak of commitment pooling, or commons-based coordination, I’m talking about lost practices …. ancient, rural, tucked away in the margins of modern life. But the commons never disappeared. It was buried, renamed, or absorbed into systems that forgot where they came from.

In fact, the widespread, cross-cultural presence of commitment pooling systems (known as Mweria in Kenya, Mutirão in Brazil, Minga in Colombia, or the original Isusu / Esusu in Nigeria) reveals a foundational economic logic that predates written history and challenges dominant market-based paradigms.

Far from being isolated traditions, these decentralized, trust-based systems for mutual labor and resource sharing represent a convergent evolution of human cooperation, functioning as proto-economic protocols rooted in reciprocity, memory, and collective care.

Their structural similarity across continents suggests that humanity evolved not in competitive exchange economies, but in relational, regenerative systems …. what might be called the original “economic grammar” of our species.

And these systems are still alive. You can see them today in food cooperatives, barn raisings, childcare swaps, informal labor rotations, and mutual credit groups. Even modern structures like Credit Unions, Friendly Societies, and Visa and Mastercard carry echoes of this same logic ….. trusted commitments and deferred reciprocity, just abstracted, formalized, and monetized.

Of course, in many places, these practices have been displaced …. replaced by savings-and-loan models centered on cash, interest, and externalized risk. But when the relational logic is supported instead of suppressed, something incredible happens: trust networks regenerate.

That’s what I’ve witnessed with many friends through Grassroots Economics …. by working alongside communities, not to introduce a new system, but to revive an old one. One that people already know in their bones.

With simple tools like Sarafu Network (a mobile commitment pooling system), communities reawaken these practices: accounting for their promises, coordinating care, exchanging labor and surplus through shared commitment pools. It's about showing up, being remembered, and growing trust over time.

And here’s the most important part:
When something breaks …. the system doesn’t collapse.

Because these are not bilateral agreements (Bob owes Sally). They’re networks.
And in a real network, no single failure defines the whole. Trust can be rewoven. Memory can hold. Healing is possible.

To be real …. in Things Fall Apart, the center couldn’t hold.
The network was too frayed. The rupture too deep. The systems of reciprocity too overwhelmed by forces that didn’t understand them … and worse, refused to.

Okonkwo cannot live with a world where his centre has collapsed, and he takes his own life. His death is not just personal tragedy — it is the symbol of a network too frayed to repair, a centre that truly could not hold.

So yes, things really did fall apart.
Not just for one village, but for countless communities around the whole damn world whose coordination systems were torn apart and replaced by abstractions: markets, currencies, institutions, ideologies …. systems that promised order, but didn’t know how to heal.

Why did it collapse? Because the density of trust had already been thinned. When relationships are shallow, siloed, or dependent on too few strands, a single break can unravel the whole. Systems don’t fall apart simply because something goes wrong; they fall apart when the fabric of trust is too thin to absorb rupture.

The work today is to weave more densely, to build anti-fragile commons: networks where the breaking of one promise doesn’t cascade into collapse, but instead strengthens the whole by activating the memory, reciprocity, and care embedded in many other ties.

That is how we can choose differently now.

The question before us is not whether things fall apart … they always do. The question is whether we can design systems that remember how to heal. Whether we can build networks strong enough that when one strand breaks, the whole does not collapse.

What would it take now (here where we are right now) to make the center hold again?

Not by going back, but by regenerating what still lives beneath the surface:
Relational logic. Shared memory. Commitment as coordination.

This is where the work of Grassroots Economics (and every effort to revive commitment pooling) matters most. Not as nostalgia, not as utopia, but as practice: creating commons that can absorb rupture and still hold together.

It’s not theory. It’s practice. It’s already happening.

And if we study and practice these patterns seriously (like really study them and really practice them). Not just as economics, but as living systems,
We may finally move from watching more and more things fall apart…
To learning how to hold them together.

And so we return to Yeats — but this time, with another possibility in view, not of falling apart, but of knitting together

Things knit again; the center learns to hold;
Mere harmony is loosed upon the world,
A dawn-bright tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of belonging blooms;
The best regain conviction, while the worst
Find kinder, steadier security.

This is the choice before us. Achebe showed us what it looks like when the center fails. Our task is to weave the story where it holds.