Marty's thoughts

We are living in the age of the knot-cutter. Our President

This is not a comment on ideology or party, but on a style of leadership that emerges when complexity feels intolerable. The knot-cutter is a figure who confronts entanglement—social, geopolitical, cultural, institutional—and concludes that the problem is not the strands themselves, but the time and patience required to deal with them.

The solution, then, is decisive action.

The image is ancient. When Alexander the Great encountered the Gordian knot, a problem defined by its resistance to ordinary solutions, he did not attempt to untie it. He cut it. Legend records the act as brilliance. History records it as spectacle. What is often forgotten is that the knot did not disappear from the world; only Alexander’s relationship to it did.

Modern knot-cutting leadership operates the same way. Faced with systems that are knotted rather than linear—conflicts without beginnings, grievances without expiration, feedback loops without closure—the knot-cutter assumes that force, clarity, or speed can substitute for understanding. Complexity is treated as weakness. Delay is treated as failure. Ambiguity is treated as betrayal.

In linear systems, this approach works. If a problem has a beginning, a middle, and an end, decisive action can move it forward. But knotted systems do not unfold in time. They persist as conditions. Past and future cross in the present. Memory, identity, fear, and imagination hold tension without aging.

In such systems, cutting does not resolve. It redistributes.

The cut produces immediate relief—clarity replaces confusion, motion replaces paralysis—but it also creates something durable: memory. In human affairs, memory is stronger than rope. Every decisive cut becomes a reference point, a grievance, a justification, a story retold. The knot reforms, tighter and less flexible, no longer capable of being loosened because the slack has been removed.

This is why knot-cutting feels powerful and fails structurally. It mistakes atemporality for delay. It assumes there is an “end” to reach, when the system offers only orientation. It promises closure where only management of tension is possible.

The danger is not that knot-cutters act too boldly. It is that they act as if time itself were the solution. In knotted systems, time does not heal. It only preserves.

We should be careful, then, not to confuse decisiveness with resolution. Some problems are not solved by cutting, and some leaders are elevated precisely because the knot already exists. They offer an exit from discomfort, not from the structure itself.

Imagination still creates fact. But in a knotted world, facts do not line up into progress. They bind into history.

And history, once tightened, is very hard to loosen again.