For nearly two centuries, we have been told that order must be imposed from the top down. Whether it’s a government department in Wellington or a centralised trust board, the message is the same: the "centre" knows best. But in Taitokerau, we know this is a "Bad Explanation" that has left our regions drained and our people waiting for permission to thrive.

The Insight: The Entropy of the Centre

Centralised systems—what I call the "Babylonian" model—are thermodynamically broken. In physics, trying to force order from a single point into a complex system creates massive "entropy" or disorder. Think of the "Runanga" or "Trust Board" models often imposed on us; they often create a "Brown Bureaucracy" that mimics the Crown, separating the resources from the actual flax-roots need.

When power is centralised, information gets lost. The managers at the top can never have the granular, local knowledge held by the whānau at the "edge" of the network. This leads to sub-optimal decisions, high energy costs for bureaucracy, and a system so fragile that one bad policy at the top propagates disorder everywhere.

Three Threads, One Kākahu: The Harmony Of Physics, Faith, And Whakapapa

I’ve spent a lot of time on the porches of Taitokerau, listening to the old people talk about the "good old days" while watching the logging trucks carry our whenua away. It’s a heavy sight. You see those logs—61% of our timber exported raw—and you’re watching the sunlight, the rain, and the very nutrients of our soil leave the harbor. It’s what we call the "Leaky Bucket" economy. It often feels like we are caught between three different worlds that don't speak the same language: the Whare Wānanga, the science lab, and the Bible. But here in the North, we are realising they aren't competing; they are three threads of the same Kākahu.

They say the darkest part of the night is just before the dawn, but for a while there, I wasn't sure the sun was ever coming back up.

I’m going to be straight with you: this is the scariest and most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done. I’m opening up about a mental health crisis that took me right to the edge—scarily close to a final exit. I'm talking about a state of total "decoherence," where the weave of my world didn't just fray; it felt like it had completely disintegrated. In our Māori worldview, we might call this a heavy season in Te Kore—the Great Void. But as Reverend Māori Marsden taught us, Te Kore isn't just "nothingness"; it is the realm of raw potentiality.

There’s a heavy feeling hanging over our towns lately, a kind of quiet isolation that shouldn't exist in a place as connected as the North. We’re surrounded by whānau, yet the "loneliness epidemic" is hitting us hard. It’s because we’ve been sold a lie—a "Bad Explanation" that says you are a solo agent, a "self-made man" responsible only for yourself. We’ve been conditioned to think of ourselves as separate "billiard balls" clicking against each other but never truly merging. This is the Newtonian error, the architecture of Babylon, and it’s making us sick.

Kia ora e te whānau. Pull up a chair and let’s have a real talk for a moment. 🌿 We often think of our faith or our deepest beliefs as a direct, unedited download from the heavens—a fixed rock that has never changed. But if we look at the whakapapa of history, we start to see the fingerprints of men where we expected the hand of the Divine.

The truth is, much of what we call "standard doctrine" in Te Tai Tokerau was forged in the fires of political survival. In the language of physicist David Deutsch, many of these "rules" are "Bad Explanations"—ideas that are easy to vary because they served a specific person’s power rather than the universal truth of the Woven Universe.