Haiti is drowning in noise. The chatter of morning radio. The endless quarrels on WhatsApp. The processions of aid trucks plastered with foreign logos. The livestreams, the hashtags, the slogans. Noise so thick it masquerades as movement.
But noise is not structure. And structure is what endures.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb gives us a ladder: People → Events → Ideas → Systems → Architectures. A hierarchy of consequence. The higher you climb, the more you shape reality itself. The lower you remain, the more you narrate a world that someone else has already built.
People
At the base are the faces—politicians, pastors, influencers, anyone who lives on recognition. They rise and fall with attention. They narrate the moment but cannot outlive it.
Influencers like Carel Pèdre or Berthrude Albert play here. They mobilize attention, they frame stories, they shine light. But they remain bound to the fragile whims of algorithms and donors. Their reach is real, but it is not structural.
Events
Next are the happenings—the march, the protest, the fundraiser, the viral hashtag. They stir the body, but they fade like storms. Carel’s livestream may galvanize thousands, Berthrude’s campaign may raise quick money. NGOs excel at this level, staging spectacles for donor reports. But when the cameras leave, the scaffolding collapses.
And here, too, are Haiti’s gangs. They stage blockades, kidnappings, and massacres that seize the nation’s breath. These are events—explosive, terrifying, disruptive. They force attention, but they leave little residue beyond trauma. When one gang falls, another takes its place. Events of violence, not systems of justice.
Ideas
Ideas endure longer. Liberty. Sovereignty. Human dignity. Haiti gifted these to the world in 1804. But ideas need soil—debate, teaching, institutions—to grow. Without that, they rot into slogans, recycled by NGOs, parroted by politicians.
Gangs do not trade in ideas. Their currency is fear, not philosophy. They occupy headlines but not history.
Systems
Systems are where change becomes real. A school that functions without favoritism. A court that judges without bribes. A clinic that heals without “knowing someone.” Systems are the bones of a nation.
NGOs pretend to build systems, but too often they erect shadows—parallel networks, tethered to donor dollars. They mimic permanence but vanish when the money dries up.
Gangs, too, claim systemhood in the neighborhoods they dominate: they collect “taxes,” they enforce “laws,” they decide who lives or dies. But this is not a system—it is an anti-system, parasitic, sustained only by the absence of state systems. It thrives on vacuum. It is fragile the moment sovereignty returns.
Architectures
At the top are the invisible frameworks that define the possible. Constitutions. Energy grids. Financial networks. These are architectures—so deep they feel like nature itself.
Here is where Haiti has been abandoned. Our financial architecture is wired to dependency. Our political architecture fractured by design. No influencer touches this. No NGO sustains this. No gang reaches this. Architectures belong to the builders, not the narrators, not the destroyers.
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The Fragility of Narrators and Predators
Influencers narrate. NGOs perform. Gangs terrorize. They all operate in the shallow rungs of people and events. They dominate attention but not history. They shape fear, not futures.
The deeper levers—systems and architectures—remain untouched, and until Haiti climbs, noise will rule us.
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A Haitian Case: Remittances
Look at remittances. At the event level, we celebrate when money floods in after a quake. At the system level, we might regulate transfer costs, create diaspora bonds. At the architecture level, we could rewire the economy so remittances build sovereignty, not dependency.
That is the climb we refuse to make.
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The Climb We Must Make
Haiti is a land of personalities and gangs, of events and spectacles. But it is barren of systems, starved of architectures. This is why we regress. We waste energy at the bottom.
Progress means moving beyond faces, beyond fear, beyond photo ops. It means systems that endure, architectures that sustain.
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Closing Word
Fraudulent NGOs thrive at the bottom. Influencers, no matter how sincere, remain there too. Gangs, with all their terror, live trapped in the same shallow strata.
But nations endure at the top. Systems and architectures are slow, invisible, unglamorous—and they are the only things that last.
So measure Haiti’s future not by the influencer’s trend, not by the NGO’s ribbon-cutting, not by the gang’s blockade. Measure it by whether systems are built. Measure it by whether architectures are sovereign.
Ask always: are we still narrating reality, or are we finally shaping it?
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