Adrian Bejan grew up in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu—a regime that believed it could plan a society as an engineer bolts together a machine. Every factory, farm, and loaf of bread was dictated from the center.

Bejan got out. A scholarship took him to MIT, where he trained as a mechanical engineer, the discipline of heat and motion and machines.

But he carried something the regime never managed to train out of him: a suspicion that living things are not meant to be planned.

In 1989, the Romanian people brought Ceaușescu down. A few years later, on a flight home from a physics conference in France, the idea that had been circling Bejan’s mind for years finally landed.

He had found a law. And once you see it, you’ll see it everywhere.

The Penny Drops

The conference featured Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel laureate who studied the branching, forking structures that nature seems to display everywhere. Prigogine’s verdict on those patterns was, essentially, this: It’s a coincidence. Just the beautiful shape of randomness.

But that answer gnawed at Adrian Bejan. On his return flight somewhere over the Atlantic, he formulated the alternative—what he would eventually call the constructal law.

It goes like this:

Sit with that if you can, because those 26 words do a LOT of work.

Bejan is claiming that life’s configurations are no mere decorations. They’re solutions. Anything in the universe that involves movement—water, blood, heat, goods, people, or ideas—will, if free to change, evolve toward a design that moves that thing more readily.

Its ubiquity makes it look like a physical law. And the tell-tale fingerprint of such a law is a pattern we already recognize. Bejan calls it vascularization. A few large channels, feeding many small ones.

Few large, many small.

Pattern of Patterns

Let’s look through this lens together. What do we see? A river basin is a great body of water, fed by smaller rivers, fed by tributaries, fed by streams, fed by brooks high in the mountains….

Few large, many small.

Likewise, a tree is. One truck, then limbs, then branches, then the fine spray of twigs and vein-laden leaves reaching for light. The tree’s roots stabilize it and help it absorb nutrients and water.

Again: Few large, many small.

Now your body. One pumping heart. Great arteries. Then vessels, then the near-infinite lace of capillaries that touch every single cell that composes you. Your lungs are vascularized. Your brain is a vasculature of neurons. You are, at this moment, a flow system—and every branch exists to give some current easier access.

Okay good. We get it. The Law of Flow shows up in biological systems. But the rest of the world is different, right?

Think of a city. Amid the structures are highways, then arterial roads—we literally call them arteries—then streets, then alleys and driveways. The urban vasculature grew because that’s the form that lets people and goods flow. And that’s what makes a city alive.

But here’s the thing: The river, the tree, the human cardiovascular system, and the city… These aren’t metaphors for one another. They are instantiations of the same phenomenon—the Law of Flow.

Now that you’ve peered through this lens, you’ll see myriad flow systems on your next morning walk. Perhaps in the frost on your window, or the cracks spreading across drying mud, or in the lightning that forks across the Summer sky. The living universe has a favorite form, and it is drawing it constantly, before our very eyes.

More Than a Pretty Picture

Now, a pattern is charming. But a law is dangerous. A law lets you explain, predict, and question those in charge.

And Bejan’s constructal law quietly invites three giants of theory to sit at the same table.

First, Darwin. It gives evolution a direction. I know. That sounds like heresy. Standard evolutionary theory says organisms adapt via natural and sexual selection, but it stays silent on where anything is heading. Bejan says: flow systems evolve toward ever-greater flow access.

Second, Mandelbrot. It offers a physical explanation for what had been beautiful geometry. The fractal patterns Mandelbrot mapped—those endlessly branching forms—aren’t random after all. They branch because branching is how you move a current from one point to an entire volume with the least resistance. The math has a motive.

The Invisible Hand That Shapes

For 250 years, defenders of free and open markets have leaned on beautiful but slippery ideas. Smith’s invisible hand is the idea that voluntary exchange allows people pursuing their own ends to coordinate their activities in ways that often benefit society as a whole. Then, Hayek’s spontaneous order is the insight that an economy is a vast decentralized discovery process that no central planner could ever plan or compute.

These insights are important, but they’ve always sounded a little like, trust us, this is how it works.

Bejan adds something. He says that a free economy is a flow system—a vascular network moving goods, capital, labor, and information. And like every flow system, it evolves its own vascular system when it’s free to morph. Large firms, medium firms, a teeming multitude of small ones. Again: Few large, many small. The same pattern as that in the natural world.

That means the invisible hand isn’t mystical so much as metaphorical. Smith’s hand self-organizes vascular networks—just as your body does.

And how does the central planner react? The planner looks at that vasculature—its inequality and its messiness—and tries to “fix” it. Maybe he tries to flatten it or to redirect the flows according to his idea of the well-ordered society.

But Bejan’s Law of Flow comes with a warning: When you clamp a vessel, you don’t improve circulation. When you dam every stream to make the flow “fairer,” you don’t get a fairer river basin. You get a swamp. Economic Interventionists constrict, distort, and strangle the very flows that keep the system alive — because its life depends on that vascularization. Ceaușescu tried to do better. As did the Soviets, the Maoists, and the Peronists.

All failed.

“Freedom,” Bejan writes, “is good for design.” Turns out economic freedom is not a slogan, so much as an engineering requirement. Living systems need freedom to morph, or they die.

The Taoist in the Lab

Writer Anne Quito Ephrat Livni once described Adrian Bejan as “an accidental Taoist.” That’s because two and a half thousand years before Bejan roamed the campus at Duke University, the Tao Te Ching anticipated him: Laozi said to be like water—to flow with the currents, not against them.

Resistance blocks growth. Accommodation is life.

The philosopher said it in poetry. The engineer said it in physics. And they arrived at the same truth: The living thing is the flowing thing. To live is to keep the currents open—whether in a river, a market, a body, or a soul.

So here is your new lens. Walk out into the world and look for the branches. The rivers and the roads. The arteries under the pavement and the arteries under your skin. Ask of every system you meet: Is this design letting the current flow, or is it blocking something vital? Because the moment a system can no longer accommodate the flow—that’s the moment it starts to die.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

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Correction: I incorrectly cited Anne Quito in the video; the author is Ephrat Livni. My apologies to both writers.

Enemies of freedom and the West are keen to destroy and desecrate our canon. This has already happened in the academy, where the very idea of a Western canon has long been under attack. Our collection of great works, to the extent it is still studied, is being deracinated and deconstructed.

To be college-educated about the West in 2026 is to have great works run through some combination of critical theory, identity politics, and post-colonial studies—the teeth used to chew our identity and our ideals. (Thankfully, there is a group of insurgents keeping the best of the West alive online, though one has to learn to separate signal from slop.)

Now, if you were to ask me what the most important work of the Western canon is to our sense of shared identity, it is surely the Exodus story. That story has interesting and important details. It’s full of symbolism, yet it is also based upon peoples and cultures that once lived to tell the tale.

But I want to do something risky with Exodus.

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I want to isolate its skeleton—its narrative-psychological scaffolding. Because if we are to preserve the blessings of freedom and order, we’ll do well to retell the following in different ways.

1. Captivity—Our people are not free.

2. Awakening—A visionary helps us see beyond our captivity.

3. Confrontation—Authorities of the old order deny our vision.

4. Exit—We make a decisive break with the old order.

5. Wilderness—Our newfound freedom is tested.

6. Covenant—Our freedom becomes ordered.

7. Homeland—We, a free people, create a durable home and flourish.

This narrative-psychological story structure can move mountains. So we have work to do.

Be warned, though.

The above can be appropriated by our adversaries. All they have to do is redefine freedom, and the Exodus scaffolding serves ends we want no part of. In other words, if freedom is defined as freedom from need and poverty created by x who hoard resources—where x=oligarchs, white people, or landlords—the Exodus story scaffolding will serve the parasites who will eventually become the predators.

No, we must define freedom and defend that definition just as we defend freedom itself. Freedom is the absence of interpersonal coercion. It is a condition in which a person who has brought harm to no one is not subject to the coercive will of others and can therefore act according to his own decisions and plans. In such a condition, all interpersonal relationships are consensual.

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Have you ever been to the doctor’s office and thought they were doing more harm than good?

In 1847, a Viennese doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something that should have been impossible.

At Vienna General Hospital, there were two maternity clinics. One was staffed by midwives. The other by doctors and medical students—the best-trained men in Europe. But in the doctors’ clinic, mothers were dying of childbed fever at nearly ten times the rate of the midwives’ clinic.

The experts were the problem.

Semmelweis figured out why. His students were walking straight from the autopsy room to the maternity ward. They were going from corpses to examining pregnant ladies without washing their hands.

So, as a lead physician, Semmelweis made handwashing mandatory. Mortality collapsed from eighteen percent to under two.

Despite the breakthrough, his colleagues mocked and marginalized Semmelweis, and he died in an asylum—ironically of sepsis. It took the medical establishment decades to admit what he’d proven with a bucket of chlorinated lime: Sometimes the people sworn to heal you are the ones making you sick.

Now, keep that in mind. Because I want to argue that iatrogenesis has escaped the hospital. It has infected our politics, our institutions, and our national character.

Those purporting to help are making us worse off.

Bad Therapy

Start with therapy.

In her book Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier makes an uncomfortable case: a lot of contemporary psychotherapy doesn’t heal people, so much as it recruits them. This is especially true for young people who make perfect repeat customers. They return, become dependent, and are forever “processing” their traumas—or whatever.

The modern therapeutic industry keeps clients dredging up the past, reopening wounds that had scabbed over, and hunting for external villains or systems to blame for everything that makes us feel bad. Session after session. Year after year. (Cha-ching!) On it goes.

And what has this produced? A generation with paper-thin skin, no resilience, and no internal locus of control. Young people are being trained to believe that the source of their suffering is always somewhere out there—and so the solution must be too.

That’s iatrogenesis. The therapist, with unclean hands, probes their psyches.

Too many lack the strength, fortitude, and coping mechanisms that adulthood demands.

But let’s zoom out now. Because what Shrier documents in the clinics and schools, we can see everywhere.

The Therapeutic State

Back in the sixties, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz coined a term: the “Therapeutic State.” Admittedly, I’ve never been Szasz’s biggest fan. But part of his diagnosis holds up. A Therapeutic State is a society where the government manages its people the way a bad therapist manages a client.

In other words, social problems get medicalized. Moral questions become psychological ones. Personal responsibility dissolves into diagnosis. And the state grows its power—not with tanks and Tommy guns, but with clipboards and case files, always in the name of some group’s well-being.

Send in the social workers! The social controllers wear lab coats. Dissent becomes pathology (gaslighting). Struggles become syndromes or systemic this, or structural that. And every syndrome requires a program, a budget, and an agency.

Now extend Szasz through Shrier, and you get what I call the Iatrogenic State.

In other words, just as bad therapy makes patients sicker, the therapeutic approach to governance makes citizens weak and dependent. If every social problem gets treated as a collective trauma, then every trauma requires state intervention. If every state intervention creates more dependence, that condition justifies the next intervention.

Government officials don’t just fail to cure what ails us. The state and its proxies become the disease vector.

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Mommy and Daddy Parties

So who runs the Iatrogenic State?

Look at our two parties, and you’ll see two archetypes—each one a natural instinct pushed to a pathological extreme.

The Democrats have become the Mommy Party. The Republicans, the Daddy Party. And in their unhealthy forms, Jungians have names, too: the Devouring Mother and the Tyrannical Father.

The Devouring Mother loves her children so much she consumes them. She can’t let them separate, can’t let them take risks, and can’t let them grow. She seeks to control them through guilt, enmeshment, and the soft smothering of victimhood narrative and savior complex.

Meanwhile, the Tyrannical Father rules through fear. Rigid. Punitive. He seeks to crush autonomy in the name of keeping order and calls his demands for conformity discipline.

Now translate all this to politics.

The Devouring Mommy Party infantilizes half the country and casts them as perpetual victims. Guilt campaigns. Shame rituals. DARVO. And an endless empire of programs designed to manage and coddle their timid voting herds. They wave their carrots and conceal their sticks. The Mommy Party’s mantra is: Send in the social workers.

The Tyrannical Daddy Party overcorrects. It’s all force and no reflection. Punishment is their first resort. So they prefer to use sticks but use carrots grudgingly. The Daddy Party’s mantra is: Send in the cops.

And We the People?

Now, here’s a weird twist: These archetypes borrow each other’s weapons.

The Mommy Party keeps its legion of counselors and civil servants out front as moral cover, then sends armed men to do their dirty work—think entrapment operations, political roundups, and tax agents. And the Daddy Party? For all its contempt for therapy-speak, it’s happy to seize the therapeutic machinery once it’s built—say, by treating pornography as a “public health emergency” or suggesting we institutionalize homeless people. How about the current health secretary suggesting the state “reparent” Americans on wellness farms?

All of which brings us to a warning.

But first, I’ll admit it: I sometimes think this moment calls for more muscular actions to correct years of mollycoddling and managed decline.

I also realize that every lever of emergency power the Daddy Party introduces, it leaves for the Mommy Party. And the Devouring Mothers who pick it up next won’t be gentle nurturers. They’ll be Nurse Ratched with a grudge.

Foolish tyrants and mean mommies build the weapons their enemies will inherit. The pendulum swings back. And tit meets tat.

If muscular government has any excuse to exist right now, its one legitimate target is itself—that is, permanent institutional reform.

The Mirage

At this point, some of you are picturing a solution. Maybe a leader—someone who balances masculine strength with feminine care. Someone who sheds the strongman vulgarity of this administration and the doddering flaccidity of the last. Maybe this someone makes you proud when they walk up to the podium.

But I have five words for you: The presidency is a mirage.

We’ve had the soaring orators, and they turned out to be snakes—servants of the managerial regime surrounded by good speechwriters. The search for the perfect parent-in-chief is a symptom of the Iatrogenic State—that therapeutic mindset aimed at the White House. Someone out there will fix society for us.

Sorry. There is no salvation on a ballot.

As long as we keep outsourcing our agency to Washington, we remain patients in the iatrogenic ward, waiting for a heroic figure to make his or her rounds. But healing starts when we walk past the therapists, right up to the mirror, and then right up to our neighbors.

The Agentic Society

So what replaces the Iatrogenic State?

I call it the Agentic Society. In this society, a healing person restores her internal locus of control. She stops looking around for villains and starts practicing virtues and making stuff happen. A healing people does the same thing at scale.

That means we need new archetypes. Not the Devouring Mother and the Tyrannical Father, but the Samaritan and the Steward. The Caregiver and the Mentor. The Educator and the Entrepreneur. And if you catch a glimpse of Mom and Dad in those figures—healthy this time—so be it.

It means a structural swap: government by imposition gives way to governance by agreement—that is, consent, contract, and community. Neighbors helping neighbors, not because a program mandates it, but because that’s what neighbors do.

Decentralization means the new gravitational center is local. That is, proximate, voluntary institutions replace the wild swings of the national political pendulum.

Tocqueville saw this in Americans two centuries ago. We were a people who formed an association before breakfast to start solving a problem by lunch. Yet those muscles have atrophied. Politics swallowed civil society, and TikTok activism replaced critical thinking.

Still, atrophy is not amputation.

Even as the sociopaths in Washington are sure to keep draining us through debt and taxation—engineering our dependence; billing us for our own sedation—we can start to work those communitarian muscles again.

Semmelweis couldn’t get the doctors in Vienna to wash their hands because doing so would mean admitting they were the disease vectors. The medical establishment chose its pride over its people, so all Semmelweis’s gains were lost. Our political establishment faces the same choice, and it too will choose pride over the people. The Iatrogenic State will never diagnose itself, which means we have to wash our hands of it.

So, what does that mean to you and me?

Every minute we pull out of politics and pour into our block, our congregation, our kids, and our craft—is an improvement that will add up. And every dollar redirected from the architecture of oppression to the contours of agreement? That’s how we heal society.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

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A story is powerful. It is, after all, a compressed simulation of life. It follows a beginning, a middle, and an end—where a character’s world is established, disrupted by conflict, and he is transformed in the course of events. At their cores, characters embody competing motivations, values, and visions of what ought to be.

We instinctively identify with one side, hoping the protagonist succeeds while the antagonist stands in the way—whether due to his ignorance, temptation, or malice. By inviting us to inhabit another person’s choices and their consequences, stories become more than entertainment. They serve as laboratories that allow us to rehearse moral judgments, test competing value systems, and discover not just what happens to us, but what kind of person we aspire to become.

Stories can be transmission vectors for three primitives that are powerful both in isolation and when combined: memes, models, and metaphors.

Memes

The first functions as little bits of linguistic and conceptual code. The linguistic aspect is the transmission medium, which must take the receiver into account. The conceptual aspect is the idea being transmitted. The fact of transmission is mostly binary—that is, the idea penetrates the minds of others, or it does not. The idea doesn’t have to be true or even have verisimilitude. It simply has to be transmissible, as demonstrated by whether and to what extent the code is transmitted and repeated.

If it is readily transmitted, the code penetrates the mind of the receiver, changes it in some way, and prompts the new host to propagate the idea so that it gets transmitted again.

Are these good?

It depends, of course, on their transmissibility and persuasiveness.

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Models

Confusingly, a model can be a type of meme. But stripped down, a model—specifically a mental model—is a simplified way of understanding how certain phenomena work. It functions as an internal framework your mind uses to interpret the world, make decisions, solve problems, and predict outcomes.

A model isn’t just an idea, though. It’s a representation of how parts of a given system relate to one another. It includes entities, relationships, and often causal links, but generally the fewest possible to understand the phenomenon in question. A good model lets you anticipate what will happen if conditions change, and if it can’t generate expectations about the future, it’s probably not very good. Of course, the best models are notable for what they leave out, as much as what they include.

1. Knowledge Problem. No central planner possesses the dispersed knowledge held by millions of individuals.

   1. Prediction. As decision-making becomes more centralized, errors become larger and slower to correct.

2. Feedback Loops. People make better decisions when they bear the consequences of those decisions.

   1. Prediction. Systems that separate authority from accountability decay.

3. Incentives. People reliably respond to incentives, even when their intentions are noble.

   1. Prediction. Changing incentives alters behavior more reliably than rhetoric.

4. Spontaneous Order. Complex coordination emerges without central direction in language, markets, law (common law), and the internet.

   1. Prediction. Institutions that evolve through countless small adaptations generally prove more resilient than those designed all at once.

5. Discovery. Competition is less about defeating rivals than discovering better ways of doing things.

   1. Prediction. Failure becomes information as much as success. So, if competition is suppressed, inferior ideas and products will persist.

Are these good?

Again, it depends, of course, on their transmissibility and persuasiveness. While these are interesting insights, we should note that almost all of the above lack emotional resonance, at least compared to memes—especially competing memes.

Metaphors

A metaphor is a conceptual mapping that interprets one thing in terms of another, transferring selected patterns or relationships from a familiar source domain to a different target domain in order to enhance understanding. Compared with a model, a metaphor need not explain mechanisms or make predictions. Its primary function is to reveal similarity or provide a new perspective, whereas a mental model’s primary function is to represent how a system works so that one can explain, predict, and act.

The philosopher Max Black wrote,

A memorable metaphor has the power to bring two separate domains into cognitive and emotional relation by using language directly appropriate to the one as a lens for seeing the other... Metaphorical thought is a distinctive mode of achieving insight, not to be construed as an ornamental substitute for plain thought.

Briefly, then, a metaphor invites us to see one thing as another. A model develops that invitation into a systematic framework for investigation.

These are common. But are they good?

Once more, it depends, of course, on their transmissibility and persuasiveness.

How does it feel?

The lesson is not that memes, models, and metaphors are weak. It is that abstraction alone rarely moves people. A model may explain why decentralized systems outperform centralized ones (one of my favorites). A metaphor may reveal freedom as an ecosystem rather than a machine. A meme may compress an entire moral vision into five unforgettable words.

But unless such primitives are joined to fear, hope, loyalty, betrayal, sacrifice, aspiration, and consequence, they remain cognitively interesting but emotionally inert. They may enter the mind without ever reaching the part of us that chooses, commits, and acts.

That leaves us with two tasks.

The first is to reintegrate these primitives into stories, where they can acquire heroes and villains, stakes and suffering, victories and losses. The story supplies the peanut butter around the pill: emotional resonance around the message.

But the second task may be even more important. We should learn to design memes, models, and metaphors that possess moral and emotional valence from the beginning. “Decentralization improves information processing” is a proposition. “No one should have the power to ruin lives without facing consequences” is a moral claim.

The first informs. The second recruits.

Persuasion becomes powerful when an idea does not merely explain the world, but reveals what is worth loving, what is worth resisting, and who we might become if we change our behavior for the better.

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Most people try to answer with politics: Vote harder. Protest louder. Or wait for that “constitutional moment” that never comes.

I want to offer you a different answer. It’s called subversive innovation, and it might be the most underrated force for human freedom on the planet.

Subversive innovation runs on a simple, three-part formula:

That’s it. Three approaches. But the devil, of course, is in the details.

So let’s make this a little more concrete.

One Big Example

Ever heard of Bitcoin? It’s a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. It’s not perfect. But it’s a good example of subversive innovation. Set all that aside for a moment, though, because that’s not the only interesting bit.

What’s interesting is that Bitcoin is a moral teacher.

Think about what actually happened. Thousands of people collaborated to build and defend a global monetary network with no CEO, no president, and no master. Nobody gave them permission, because nobody could. It was developed peacefully in freedom.

Now, run Bitcoin through the subversive innovation formula…

Transaction costs? Bitcoin cut out the parasitic gatekeepers who have put a toll on every financial transaction for centuries.

Predation costs? It uses cryptography to raise the price of theft and manipulation to prohibitive levels.

Switching costs? For the first time in living memory, ordinary people have a real exit from fiat money.

Bitcoin also planted a flag on the battlefield against unjust authority. It took a phrase we recite but rarely practice—“the consent of the governed”—and turned it into running code.

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The Ecosystem

And it inspired thousands of successors, an entire ecosystem in constant churn. The ecosystem now includes self-sovereign identity, so you become the steward of your own data instead of a product harvested by rentiers. Or what about mesh networks, which decentralize the very architecture of the internet, liberating information from ISP conglomerates and authoritarian overseers?

Each of these is a subversive innovation. Each shifts power away from the tower and toward the tapestry—that is, away from power hierarchies toward lateral relationships among sovereign individuals.

I’ve said elsewhere that if underthrow is the end, subversive innovation is the means. Here’s the Aesop image I keep returning to: We’re in the transition from fearing the bear to empowering the bees.

The bear is big, singular, and dominant. The bees are small, numerous, and coordinated by something the bear can’t comprehend. The bear can raid one hive, but he can’t fight the swarm forever. Subversive innovators ask: How can We the Remnant start to function more like a swarm?

The Dark Twin

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before we get carried away, a warning… Every technology that opens a path to self-sovereignty has a shadow. Call it oppressive innovation. It might be the same technological substrate, but different innovators behind the scenes.

Oppressive innovation inverts the formula. It raises the cost of cooperation and lowers the cost of predation. Think surveillance architectures. Or programmable money like a CBDC that answers to the issuer rather than the holder. What about digital chokepoints—like this—on speech and commerce?

Make no mistake: state and corporate actors are building these systems right now—not to lighten your subjugation but to deepen it. So we can be neither naive nor complacent. The race is real, and it is running right now. Will we be caught flat-footed while the powerful build a digital cage for us right here on the starting line?

Betting on the Bees

Here’s why I remain cautiously optimistic: Steven Pinker’s research in The Better Angels of Our Nature points to something remarkable—Violence and predation as strategies for acquiring resources have trended downward over the centuries. That’s no accident. Better political organization and more widely distributed productive means make war less attractive. They also make political shenanigans—war by other means—less attractive, too.

Picture humanity as a bell curve, with SOCIOPATHIC at one tail, COLLABORATIVE at the other. Most of us are clustered in the peaceable middle. If Pinker is right, that whole curve has been drifting—with occasional lurches, fits and starts—away from the SOCIOPATHIC tail.

Subversive innovation is how we keep that improvement going. But notice, it’s not just about technology. It includes institutional innovations—that is, new ways to enshrine individual rights, to protect property, and apply common law so that people bear more of the costs they would rather impose on others.

In any case, markets and moral practice—applied over and over—mute the lesser angels of our natures.

This is also why the old theoretical debates about ideal end states amount to dormroom debates. We want to keep our north star, but stay nimble. The world changes too fast for academic arguments that persuade too few, and the perfect constitutional moment never seems to come. While theorists debate ideal endpoints, builders are busy shifting the curve.

Swarm Order

So here’s the charge.

If we cherish self-sovereignty, self-organization, and self-government—we have a duty. Not to win the next election, nor to settle the next debate. Our duty is to build systems that move the human curve toward free collaboration, away from centralized sociopathy.

Every crypto wallet, every mesh node, every self-sovereign identity whose reputation we hold in our hands is a kind of vote that gets counted whether or not any authority tallies it.

So, let’s arm the bees, bring down the bear, and build the post-political world. Indeed, let’s think harder about what kind of world our kids should inherit. And then go make it.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

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If you’ve been reading Underthrow, you know it’s no accident that our systems are breaking. It’s the predictable result of centralized authority doing what it does. It concentrates control, erodes consent, and sets in motion a cycle of empires until the accountability loops snap and bureaucracies buckle under their own weight.

You’ve watched the fruit of democratic socialism ripen in real time. You’ve weighed the idea of subscription governance against legacy government. You’ve measured the iron laws of civilizational decline against America’s 250th birthday.

So ask yourself: What does a subscription mean to you?

Most subscribers buy content—another queue of hot takes to skim while the finite game grinds on. That’s what most people just accept.

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Paid subscribers help transform ideas into experiments, experiments into institutions, and institutions into alternatives.

When you support Underthrow, you’re helping us:

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Free readers ride the surface waves—the essays, the podcasts, the new ways of thinking. And that matters, especially when you share.

But paid subscribers drop into the undertow, the deeper current where diagnosis turns into growth and constructive change—one lateral agreement, one parallel jurisdiction, or one subversive innovation at a time.

You’re not here for more noise. You sense the adjacent possible: fraternal orders of the virtuous, accountability loops with teeth, and membranes of self-government nested like spheres within spheres. The paid tier is no paywall. It’s a membrane that turns passive observers into collaborators. As a paid subscriber, you equip us to fight the Mindwar.

Consider what we’re up against: Well-paid partisan performers and purveyors of propaganda who engineer the news to scatter our attention and keep us pliant.

When you support us, you help us cut through the noise and grow our counterpower. Paid subscribers get the full podcast archive plus transcripts and presentation decks. This not only supports our ongoing work but also amplifies it.

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Underthrow enables ideas to become experiments in which we build parallel systems that challenge the dominator models.

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UPGRADE to COUNTERPOWER

Upgrading says yes to the version of you that refuses to outsource your agency to failing institutions. Upgrading hoists the black flag until we can once again be proud to plant a new one in a free country.

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You’ve seen the cycles. You know that voting harder in the old game won’t cut it.

The tide is turning.
Surface waves make splashy headlines.
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UPGRADE to COUNTERPOWER

Thank you for sticking with us—free or paid.

—Max Borders, Editor
—James Borders, Video and Audio Design

Start with this: The average American is likely to be wealthier than 95 percent of people on earth, and America is a mixed economy. And this prosperity didn’t arrive by chance. It arrived thanks to millions of strangers coordinating without ever meeting—through firms, corporations, investors, supply chains, workers, and the price system. We eat because a network of people we’ll never meet, or get to thank, has organized complex industries around feeding us. A mature economic philosophy starts with the recognition of such dynamics—not with grievances, not with envy, and certainly not with just-so stories.

No, that’d be Marxism.

It starts with entitlement dressed up as analysis. Marx thought that the whole market system was based on theft, but turned right around and used his theory to justify institutionalized stealing. Just so you know, if that’s your starting point, it ain’t gonna work. You need more net producers than net consumers.

The Central Claim

Marxists are fond of saying true socialism has never been tried. Even less doctrinaire folks are fond of saying that Marxism sounds great in theory, but fails in practice. The truth is, Marxism fails in both theory and practice. It fails in theory, because its core doctrines rest on mistaken premises about economics and human nature. It fails in practice, because every attempt to implement it produces the opposite of what it promises. It fails on both counts because if your economy is going to have more Makers than Takers, either the Makers get rewarded for their effort and risk-taking, or you’ll have to enslave people. (That’s right: slavery.) Any system that requires slavery sucks.

Eight Failures of Marxism

Remember, Marx taught that socialism is the stage before communism. So, here are eight failures of Marxism that matter.

1. The Labor Theory of Value

Marx claimed a good’s value comes from the labor used to produce it. But value isn’t poured into a good. It’s assigned by the person who wants the thing. For example, two shirts might have the exact same labor inputs, but one shirt has a picture of Che Guevara and another a picture of Milton Friedman. Ironically, more people are willing to pay more money for Che Guevara shirts than Milton Friedman shirts. That’s because value is subjective. Marx thought value is objective, so thought wrong.

Market Entrepreneurship is the discipline of guessing what people will want. Profit is what happens when that guess is right, and one sells a unit for more than what it cost to produce. Profit is a reward for that correct anticipation, not the confiscation of somebody’s labor.

2. Alienation

Marx watched factory workers repeat the same motion all day and thought it dehumanizing. He wasn’t wrong about the boredom and the hard labor. He was wrong about the tradeoff. Pre-industrial labor was just as boring and backbreaking for the most part.

Specialization is the reason a single farmer today feeds hundreds of people instead of four. Every economic arrangement trades one thing for another. For example, entrepreneurs risk time and capital that workers don’t. But if workers genuinely prefer cooperative ownership, nothing stops them from forming one—since worker co-ops are legal and already exist. But they have to compete for customers like anyone else. So America doesn’t ban Marx’s alternative. It just refuses to mandate it.

3. Exploitation

Strip away the labor theory of value, and the charge of exploitation collapses with it. An employer offering a wage and a worker accepting it is not a hostage situation. It’s a trade both sides prefer to the alternative of no trade at all.

Labor markets are thus no conspiracy against the working class. They’re what happens when millions of individual decisions about time, skill, and payment are made in an economy with many alternatives, where prices are set mainly by labor supply and demand.

4. Abolition of Private Property

If you take away ownership, you take away the reason—and the incentive—to be a good steward of property. Nobody repaints a rental they’re about to abandon. No one invests in building a new apartment building if the city is going to freeze rents. Multiply that logic across an entire economy, and you get exactly what history delivered with socialism: collectivized farms that starved, state factories that rotted out, common land that nobody protected because everybody owned it, so nobody did.

5. Abolition of Market Prices

Prices aren’t a symptom of capitalism. They’re a decentralized information service—the only one humanity has ever built that tells millions of strangers, simultaneously, what’s scarce, what’s abundant, and whether the incentive is strong enough for any given person to buy.

Kill the price system, and you don’t get equality. You get commissars guessing how much of some good a nation needs, or guessing wrong in both directions at once: shortages of what people want, like Soviet bread, or mountains of what they don’t, like Soviet shoes.

6. Historical Materialism

Marx reduced history to a single metanarrative: class conflict. But geography carved the trade routes. Culture shaped what people were willing to sacrifice for. Technology rewrote what was possible. Marx’s predictions about capitalism’s inevitable collapse have been repeatedly postponed for over a century, which is what happens when a theory is meant to explain everything but is unfalsifiable.

7. Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Every promised “temporary” dictatorship in the Marxist tradition became a permanent bureaucracy. Why? Because authorities with the power to seize resources never develop a desire to give power back. Communism doesn’t run on consent, after all. It runs on compulsion—indefinitely. That’s because the moment the compulsion stops, people either leave or start producing and trading. And as we suggested, private property rights are preconditions of widespread production and trade.

8. Human Nature

Marx believed man could be remade—so under different conditions, self-interest would dissolve into solidarity. Every regime that tried to accelerate that transformation ended up sending good people off to the Gulags. If you need force to make the Socialist Man and Woman, your system ain’t gonna work for very long.

Lasting institutions are the ones built for humans as they are—not how we wish them to be. Regimes that assume they can remake human beings tend to stack up bodies. The Black Book of Communism estimates 100 million people died under communist regimes. If your response to that is that real communism hasn’t been tried, I think we’d want to know how many more deaths are acceptable to figure it out.

Evolution Over Revolution

Here’s the alternative to the warmed-over Marxism that is animating the Democratic Socialists: Let ideas compete in niches. Markets already run on this principle: constant feedback through profit and loss, a verdict rendered daily instead of promised for some future decade. Undistorted markets are the ultimate accountability loops.

If communal ownership, worker cooperatives, or any alternative to various corporate forms in most markets actually deliver on their promises, you don’t need a revolution to prove it. People will just migrate to the better system. The new system needs a chance to compete at a smaller scale. Different people need the freedom to try it or something else—on their own terms.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

Jennifer Baker, PhD, receives about $100,000 per year in monetary compensation, plus an additional ~$30,000 in benefits. Because she works at a state university—The University of Charleston—supported by both state and federal taxpayers, she is the direct beneficiary of what we might call macrolooting. Her salary depends, at least in part, on compulsory taxation, placing her in the comfortable position of evaluating the ethics of breaching paywalls while leaving the coercive institutions that fund her livelihood unexamined.

Yet, as an American and resident of SC, I’m compelled to bankroll her salary and the salaries of most other academics with whom I disagree and who inculcate bad ideas in our smartest kids. In other words, if I wanted to avoid paying her salary, I would have to pay an exit tax to leave the country, and lose my citizenship.

With all this in mind, let’s turn now to the subject of “microlooting.”

Here, Baker opens a recent Psychology Today post.

If you deliberately scan one fewer lemon than you are taking at the self-checkout at Whole Foods, you might be “microlooting.” This newly coined term does a nice job of distinguishing the highly punishable crimes of shoplifting and looting from what would be going on in a “sneak an extra lemon after buying others” situation.

In this post, she considers the ethics of theft as an act of protest.

But microlooting isn’t exactly shoplifting, says Baker. She writes:

The difference is that a shoplifter might be motivated by anything at all, from need to habit to thrill. A microlooter is motivated in a distinct way: it’s [sic] fairness. You are microlooting that lemon if you think the corporation you are transacting with deserves at least a lemon less than what they are charging. It is a small (“micro”) rebellion against our commercial system and its pricing.

Fairness? I’m reminded of my five-year-old, who claims it’s not fair every time mommy or daddy says no, or gives her three pieces of candy instead of five. It’s not just that people have radically different conceptions of fairness. It’s also that people tend to rationalize whatever conception of fairness benefits them or the population they think deserves a collective pity party.

Behold, therefore, an academic who makes six figures plus benefits, probably shops at Whole Foods—but presumably neither Piggly Wiggly nor Food Lion—and would like for us to consider the ethics of activists stealing from corporations (rather than shopping with a competitor that offers lower prices).

Baker fancies she has gnostic access to a system of moral reasoning for evaluating a “rebellion” against paying prices one doesn’t want to pay.

The defining feature is not need or self-interest, but the belief that our economic system is a bit unjust and the pilfered item functions as a bit of correction. This would mean it is not experienced by the actor as low-minded but as a high-minded, symbolic protest.

High-minded? A bit of injustice? A bit of correction?

Such seems more like a bit of moral inversion that has become typical in academic bubbles. It’s easy to see why the Democratic Socialists of America are doing well. They’ve been taking classes from professors who benefit from macrolooting and so learn to justify various forms of expropriation. Now the kids are growing up to be both macrolooters and microlooters. In fairness to Baker, she buried the lede under her commentary: Microlooting is almost justifiable, but not quite.

More on this later.

A few commenters came out against microlooting, an idea that, unsurprisingly, stemmed from a New York Times podcast discussion. Baker thinks most reactions to microlooting are hysterical and unsophisticated, so we shall expect top-notch analysis from Baker going forward. Baker is a philosopher, after all, which means she has a deeper, more nuanced perspective than microlooting’s critics. She sums up those critics’ shallow consternation as follows:

The accusation goes: those trying to get us to soften up on takes on theft, even in the roundabout way that is done in The New York Times podcast that started off all of these reactions, are wealthy hypocrites toying with a “luxury belief” that fails to acknowledge (even) their need for staid moral categories and shared condemnation of immoral behavior.

One might caution Baker against dismissing luxury beliefs, or any other species of rational irrationality. Psychology, epistemology, and economics ought not to be simply compartmentalized or separated from ethical considerations, as they are integral to justification in ethical reasoning.

More importantly, though, what is ethical behavior if not acting on one’s acknowledgment of moral categories, even if these categories function for “ordinary people” as ethical heuristics rather than as the basis for penetrating academic analysis?

But my criticism is that these reactions to the proposed concept of “microlooting” read more like moralism than philosophy. Moralists see themselves as protecting social norms and are trying to sway others. So, they pile on as many intimidating insults (“moral turpitude”!) and fears (“moral decay”! the “social contract”!) as they can. Moralistic outrage is provocative and fun to read but at odds with the idea that we are only moral when we come to understand what we are doing by taking up big questions. [Emphasis mine.]

Like the big question of… microlooting? Seems like a clear-cut case of moral decay to me. But let’s grant Baker the idea that moral intuitions and exclamation points are not enough. At the very least, we need a coherent set of justifications for holding some belief.

So, says Baker,

Ethicists are philosophers, and in contrast, they are concerned to share the basis for their claims, not just their conclusions. Philosophy is not a rallying cry, but the examination of all sorts of behaviors that might normally pass without scrutiny.

So far, we’re pretty deep into Baker’s piece and, despite her special status as a virtue ethicist, we’ve only gotten a basic backgrounder on microlooting, some throat-clearing, and status signaling about philosophers’ superiority to pundits.

Those of us awaiting her incisive analysis do so with bated breath…

In this case, the question is: do corporations get enough feedback from us about what we expect from them? Why we pay for a lemon at a corporate checkout is a great question. And symbolic protests are not laughable. Some of our political heroes, credited with bringing down oppressive systems, have recommended symbolic protest.

So much for sharing the basis of her claims.

So far, Baker is serving up assertion without argument, you know, like the idea that “we” have “expectations” of corporations and that these are somehow basic. Why “we” ought to pay for stuff is certainly not a “great question,” at least not on its face.

First, corporations survive on feedback—from media, shareholders, and especially customers. (See more on Accountability Loops here.) By contrast, if you don’t like what Baker teaches with your money, you cannot shop elsewhere. If you don’t like Whole Foods’ lemons or lemon prices, you can buy them elsewhere. That many do not suggests Whole Foods supplies something their customers want at a price they are willing to pay. Odd that’s not enough ‘feedback’ for Baker.

Second, a lemon is no mere symbol, but a thing people value. Prices are not arbitrary constructions but the way we determine how much certain people value certain things in conditions of scarcity. Again, prices are determined by how much people are willing to pay (or not) for a given scarce item, which might differ at Whole Foods compared to standing in line with the poor fat plebs with EBT cards at Walmart. Per economists David Prychitko and Steve Horwitz, prices are “information wrapped in an incentive.”

In this way, prices are ongoing, largely amoral experiments.

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Third, value is subjective, and the value of this or that lemon is determined intersubjectively by people who are willing to pay for it and how much. So, the so-called “feedback” Baker seeks about high prices can be honestly evaluated by the number of unbought lemons Whole Foods will have to throw away or use to cook lemon-pepper chicken at the hot bar.

Bizarrely, Baker leans on the work of Vaclav Havel—the Czech anti-communist of the Velvet Revolution—to claim that protesting prices through theft might be a-okay, because we are meant to stop pretending in the face of injustice, even if our little acts of defiance make prices go up for everyone else. (Whoops, consequentialism!) I kinda doubt Havel would appreciate his work being used to justify theft by rich socialists with Platonic prices bees in their bonnets.

Up to this point, we still have little in the way of Baker’s virtue-ethics analysis, just the story of how the microlooting conversation somehow grew out of an NY Times podcast about “how to be moral in an immoral society.” We can only assume that market prices are the immoral part of society, and that microlooting might amount to practicing virtue as the people protest greedy corporations.

Finally, for something we can sink our teeth into, Baker writes:

Let me quickly illustrate how an ethicist would encourage an “ordinary person” when it comes to microlooting. She would ask, first, for microlooting to be placed into a claim about the good of symbolic protest in the face of our corporate pricing mechanisms. For example, microlooting could be considered in this form: “It would be good to get around this paywall to read news because it means I am refusing to be inattentive to how unjust it is for a society to not provide access to news.” Or maybe: “I claim some ownership of this news.”

Are we getting our money’s worth yet?

For the philosopher’s analysis, we get an imaginary quotation purporting to express what an ordinary person should think if they would just listen to the expert. But rather than offering substantive justification, even in Devil’s Advocacy, Baker immediately resorts to a false analogy. That is, she likens breaching a paywall to stealing a lemon.

Digital information, however, is much closer to a non-rival good than a lemon because the marginal cost of reproducing it is nearly zero, even if the initial cost of creating it is substantial. By contrast, producing lemons requires scarce land, trees, labor, fertilizer, transportation, and countless other inputs. Their price emerges from a long chain of production costs and market decisions far more complex than any philosopher can hope to capture in a blog post or advice to an “ordinary person.” (Despite these differences, I still don't think it is virtuous to breach a paywall. But the digression is really to make a point about economics.)

But wait, there’s more….

Baker starts to pick up on some of the economics questions, however superficially. She writes:

[T]he role news plays in a free society will need some accounting. And any initial answer will be challenged: the reporter and journalist will balk at the idea that their work is owned and explain how pay for a story supports the entire industry.

Similarly, with microlooting, the risk of prices rising for other customers will factor in. And the big question of whether our current economic policies are working and fair, and by what measures, arises.

I want to give the Devil her due, at least in part.

There is indeed a sense in which we can agree that our current economic policies are not working and are unfair—as measured by, say, the dollar's purchasing power over time. But I don’t think the “big question” is “whether.” The big question is why. Baker claims economists are asking “for our participation” in determining what constitutes a functioning market, a suspicious claim given most ethicists’ ignorance about economics. I dare say, before one tries to bring ethics to questions of economics and policy, she had better have a decent grasp of how markets, businesses, and different economic systems work.

For a relevant diversion, let’s look at the actual prices over five years in the US economy. Notice Baker’s own industry has the second-highest price increases behind hospitals—despite extensive macrolooting—almost double those of food.

Notice also that the industries with the greatest price increases are the ones that receive the most taxpayer subsidies and government intervention. But we’re just supposed to have a generalized obsession with corporations.

Never mind these identifiable price distortions; Baker dismisses basic ethics, too, writing:

The conclusion I think a philosophical ethicist would draw, if considering microlooting, would not be based on the cumulative impact of it, as that is hard to establish with this issue.

Huh? Why wouldn’t the cumulative impact of microlooting be relevant to ethics, much like how raindrops are to floods? To argue that ethicists would not at least take the potential impact of microlooting into account would be to deny both deontological and consequentialist considerations from the jump.

With the former, we might use the Categorical Imperative to consider what the world would look like if we made microlooting a universal law. With the latter, one would consider the likely consequences of microlooting to social welfare. Baker doesn’t tell us why we should abandon two major strands of Western ethics.

Then, as if Alastair MacIntyre offers some Obi-Wan hand-wave, she turns to virtue ethics.

Where I think a person following virtue ethics would have trouble justifying microlooting is not in recognizing that our market system needs reform and that the corporations’ offering prices are not following fair or agreed-upon principles. Transacting with these corporations can very easily be something consumers regret, even while doing it.

I’ll pass over the apparent absurdity of “agreed-upon principles” of prices, a phrase dropped without explanation or philosophical bases demanded of the opinion moralists she criticizes.

First, let’s point out Baker’s emphasis on “corporations.” Corporate decisions normally account for only about 25 percent of the price of a good or service. Monetary policy by the Fed often accounts for 40 percent or more, with corporate responses and productivity serving as enablers. Energy costs are about 10-20 percent of a given price. So, despite all the speculation about what virtue ethicists might say to ordinary people, too few grasp how profligate Congressional spending leads to grotesque debt and subsequent increases in the money supply (the main source of inflation). As is typical—and woefully short-sighted—Baker paints a target on business when broader monetary and energy policies are significant drivers—especially in the grocery industry.

Baker goes on to say that someone might worry that “microlooting is done in a surreptitious way.” That feels icky, as it should. But, a “virtue ethicist would suggest we should be a little braver, a little louder, a little more investigatory and active, than just taking that extra lemon.” Perhaps, but this seems like a just-so story, especially given that her archetypal virtue-ethicist ain’t bitching about the money-supply increases designed to pay for Green New Boondoggles, COVID slush funds, stimmie checks, or non-citizen EBT cards. There is no virtue in ignorance, especially ignorance that’s a “little louder” than lemon theft. Still, we can agree with Baker that “we” should be “a little more investigatory.” (Emphasis mine.)

In what follows, notice the weasel word “seems.”

What type of behavior is appropriate in reaction to a pricing system that seems unfair? That is what a virtue ethicist would recommend, not just what feels brave and rebellious, but what actually is. If we do not have the means to figure that out together, we “ordinary people,” then virtue ethics suggests that no one else does, either. [Emphasis mine.]

So lemme get this straight: The big question is not whether a small act of defiance feels satisfying, but whether it is truly virtuous. After all, according to Baker, virtue ethics calls us to seek the courageous, public, and principled response to injustice—not merely a petty, secretive one.

That’s it? The buried lede is: Be a more courageous activist against Whole Foods prices?

Very well. I would like ordinary people to join me in speaking out courageously, openly, and publicly about macrolooting. It is neither virtuous to take one’s salary from state proxies nor to inculcate young people into becoming DSA voters because one couldn’t be bothered to understand the basic dynamics of a market economy. Yet NY Times’ podcasters and serious academics are having nuanced conversations about “big questions” like champagne socialists stealing lemons.

I’m sure Jennifer Baker, PhD, is a very nice person. But she’s part of an enormous syndicate of macrolooters. In exchange for siphoning off a percentage of my income and yours to subsidize her life in Charleston, she is willing to look away from the vice of macrolooting. Or, as likely, she has some virtue-ethics sophistry to defend her access to the public trough. She almost certainly stands up in front of students who—despite all the higher-ed subsidies—have gone into significant student loan debt, presumably to tell them they shouldn’t surreptitiously steal lemons, but instead be “louder” and more “active” in standing up against companies and their pricing decisions.

Corporations’ contribution to the price of lemons is negligible compared to the shameful profligacy of Congress and the money printing by the Federal Reserve. Notice that on a typical $100 grocery bill in the United States, the average supermarket keeps only about $1.70 to $2.10 as net profit. The remaining $97.90 to $98.30 is consumed by the costs of running the business, including purchasing food from suppliers, paying employee wages and benefits, covering rent and utilities, maintaining refrigeration and equipment, transporting goods, absorbing losses from spoilage and theft, paying taxes and interest, and meeting countless other operating expenses. Grocery retailing is therefore a high-volume, low-margin business in which even small increases in costs can significantly affect sales.

Most “ordinary people” don’t get that US debt stands at 130 percent of GDP, that the Federal Reserve prints money to service that debt—debt service that is now larger than the entire defense budget—and that this is the main driver of higher prices. If neither ordinary people nor virtue ethicists understand the grocery business, much less the economy, we have to start asking more serious questions about macrolooting by professors, pundits, and politicians.

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I would like to thank you, dedicated readers, for the feedback on Accountability Loops. Given your encouragement, I think Underthrow show listeners could use a dose. -MB

My deddy used to say that the 11th Commandment is “Thou shalt have air conditioning.”

When your thermostat is in good order, it reads the room, checks the target, and acts to close the temperature gap. Output bends back into input. The system corrects itself because the news of how it’s doing reaches the part that can do something about it.

That’s a feedback loop.

Hold on to the idea, because the most important versions of it are almost as important as air conditioning.

Call it an accountability loop. The defining feature is this: a person responsible for an outcome should feel consequences of that outcome. Do well, good things follow. Fail, and the failure lands on you. The signal returns to its source.

Now let’s flip that rationale. An accountability void is a seat where someone wields real power over other people’s lives but stays insulated from consequences. So, decisions flow outward, but consequences never flow back to the decider.

So here’s my thesis:

The Declaration

This year, America marks 250 years since a handful of learned colonists put the same complaint on paper. I mean, Jefferson didn’t refer to accountability loops, but the idea is there.

We remember the Declaration as a birth announcement, but it was closer to a performance review. You can go back and read the middle bit—the long list of grievances—and you will find a catalog of accountability voids. A tyrant has erected a multitude of new offices. He has sent swarms of officers to harass the people. A distant power has wielded too much authority over lives it never really had to answer to.

The Declaration’s remedy includes the most basic accountability loop there is. When a government becomes destructive of the people’s rights, the people have the right to alter or abolish it. When the government becomes destructive of people’s safety and happiness, the people have a right to alter or abolish it. That’s not purple prose. That’s a people declaring they have the power to walk away from a governance services provider who has stopped delivering the goods.

Two and a half centuries on, the question is whether we rebuilt the very thing the Founders revolted against—only worse—without accountability loops.

The Unaccountable Class

Look at who runs things now. Bureaucrats, managers, academics, media figures, institutional elites. They set the rules, steer the discourse, direct enormous resources. And when they’re catastrophically wrong, they’re usually still in the room a year later. Sometimes they get promoted!

Now look at who actually meets reality. The entrepreneur. The tradesman. The owner of the restaurant down the street. A bad menu or nasty meal can empty a dining room. A bad build loses the next contract. A founder who misreads the market eventually runs out of money. The feedback is direct, quick, and it has his name on it.

Nassim Taleb called it skin in the game. The Roman engineer slept under his own arch, but the economist who designs a healthcare policy pays nothing when it fails.

The great gap between performance and reward infects our centers of power. Trust collapses. An aloof technocracy sits atop a parade of policy disasters for which no one is ever to blame. We built a managerial regime by handing problem after problem to new agencies, new experts, new networks—until governance failures were out of our reach. And the swarms of officers returned under a different label.

Economists call this a principal-agent problem, which just means it’s really hard to get someone to act in your interest when betraying that interest costs him nothing. What we call incompetence is often just an unclosed loop.

Anatomy of a Loop

So if we want to fix it, we have to know exactly what an intact loop looks like.

An agent commits to a mission and to the objectives that serve that mission. The agent enters into a binding agreement: I will do X in exchange for Y.

If he delivers X, he will receive Y. Fail at X, and he will receive less, or he may be asked to vacate the position. The seat was conditioned on X from the very start.

That last part is what we routinely forget about in politics. In fact, politicians are in the business of punishing those who succeed at closing accountability loops and rewarding those who fail, over and over again.

So this is worth carving into every column and above every office door in Washington:

The Simplest Loop

The oldest way to ensure accountability is also the most reliable. A client and a vendor. One party judges by their own satisfaction—and keeps the power to walk away.

Hirschman saw it: exit is sharper than voice. Complaining to your provider is weak next to the credible threat of taking your business elsewhere. The vendor who stops delivering loses you, the client. Simple. Honest. And brutal.

The American Founders reached for a similar instrument. The people would tolerate governance providers if there were real consent—a real path for dissatisfaction to reach the people responsible, change their behavior, or send them packing.

Renewal

Okay, so here’s the punchline:

If I had to identify one way to renew an entire civilization, it would be tighter accountability loops.

Look at everything. Every office. Every institution. Every seat of power. And ask one question:

If the answer is no one who decided, you’ve found a void.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a few rabble-rousers found some accountability voids, listed them, and signed their names to it.

For our anniversary, the question we should really be asking is whether this generation has the courage to insist on accountability loops in everything.

Because remember:

I’m Max Borders.

Let’s criticize by creating.

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Picture two jurisdictions side by side. One is North Korea and the other is South Korea. Each has its own form of government, that is, its own set of “masters,” and its own apparatus for extracting resources and obedience. Neither is fully free. Both involve monopoly states. Yet no honest person, even an anarchist, would argue it’s wrong to prefer living in one of these jurisdictions. That is, even an anarchist would no doubt choose one side of the DMZ over the other.

The choice would not be six of one, a half-dozen of the other. Degrees of freedom matter. The kind of master matters. How much room does the master leave to live, move, trade, own property, and speak freely—even if neither jurisdiction conforms to one’s ideal?

Now we can zoom inside a single jurisdiction—say, South Korea. Here, partisans fight over who rules, which is to say they fight over who holds the monopoly on violence. Elections are a ritualized version of that fight, where ballots replace bullets. Still, I will grant a purist his premise without hesitation: elections are silly. They launder their coercive means through the language of majoritarian consent. And a vote for a master is still a vote for a master. But even silly systems like elections have consequences, and their consequences can be sillier by degree.

The democratic accountability loop is far too loose. But there is no such loop at all in North Korea.

A Shared Premise

Let me assume we’re talking to libertarian anarchists, even though those are two unfashionable terms mashed together. Also, let me stipulate just what that phrase means so we’re not talking past each other.

Anarchism, in my usage, is a condition in which no governance function falls to a monopoly. In an anarchist jurisdiction, whoever provides security, adjudication, arbitration, infrastructure, or any other governance service does so in a competitive market. The defining feature is exit. That is, a person can always contract with a rival governance provider without leaving his bedroom slippers. No provider controls the governance market by force, and competitors in such services can always enter the market.

If you can accept that as our stipulative definition of libertarian anarchism, then we agree about the goal, which we’ll call A. So disagreement is not about the goal but the means. Such disagreement sorts libertarian anarchists into two types.

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The Gnostic Anarchist

We live in condition Z. The libertarian anarchists both want condition A, which is a society without a monopoly government. The gnostic anarchist looks at A, sees the vision clearly, and falls in love with what he sees. He pictures the end state in fine detail and then, in his mind, simply arrives: Z to A, with no intervening steps. Because A is the only acceptable condition to the gnostic anarchist, every other governance arrangement is equally illegitimate to him, and fighting over any of them is silly or wrong-headed. A less brutal regime and a more brutal one collapse into the same category: not-A.

The gnostic mistakes the clarity of the destination for a map. He has no path. He proposes no sequence of steps from Z to A. He offers no account of which tradeoffs move the position forward to Y and which entrench it at Z. Knowing precisely what the summit looks like, he declines any serious discussion of the climb, and treats anyone studying the slope as having compromised his principles.

The Directional Anarchist

The directional anarchist keeps the same destination in view and never loses sight of A. But he knows he is standing on real ground, and that the climb has a topography. He can’t teleport. He has to find the route: Z to Y, or perhaps to Y′, then to X, then to W, and onward, choosing each step because it opens the next.

That route involves trade-offs, and he does not pretend otherwise. Sometimes the move toward A means accepting, for now, a less oppressive ruler over a more oppressive one, because the less oppressive arrangement widens the space in which the next pathway can be built. A direct path to A is not on the board. It is not a path he nobly refuses; it is a path that does not exist. So he works within the adjacent possible, taking steps that promise a little more liberation by degree.

That’s why the Koreas example is no digression. Preferring South to North is a directional judgment in its purest form. Neither is the final destination. One is closer to the conditions under which the destination might be reached. Refusing the comparison on the grounds that both are masters is a gnostic move: technically true, but strategically empty.

Sadly, most libertarian anarchists are gnostics.

I’d Like to Meet

Now, I owe the purist his strongest case because there is a version of him that deserves more respect.

A gnostic anarchist who is also a directional anarchist is a rare and uncompromising sort—one who refuses to accept tradeoffs that involve any monopoly governance function whatsoever, and who nonetheless has a strategy and tactics for getting from Z to A.

Of course, we all have to accept some tradeoffs with authorities—because that’s life in line at the DMV.

Still, perhaps his route runs through subversive innovation, through technologies that bypass the monopoly. Perhaps it runs through a startup society in some jurisdiction that no one yet controls, an experiment in building A on uncontested ground rather than wresting it from incumbents.

If there is any unclaimed territory in this world, I hope he finds it.

Indeed, if such a person exists, with an actual Z-to-A path that touches no monopoly governance function along the way, I want to meet him. I mean that without sarcasm. That person is not refusing strategy. He has found one that lets him avoid every monopoly, and we could surely learn from him.

But absent that person and that plan, we are left where we actually live: in a context that demands making tradeoffs and blazing genuine strategic pathways toward A. The discipline is not to pretend away the tradeoffs. It is to choose only the tradeoffs that open up possibilities, directionally toward A, and to refuse the ones that merely hand government authorities more power. That is the line between a directional anarchist and a court philosopher for the status quo.

The gnostic keeps his principles spotless by never setting foot on real earth. The directional anarchist gets dirt under his nails and stays on solid ground.

Only one of them is actually moving any earth.

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His name was Sir John Bagot Glubb.

To the men he commanded, he was Glubb Pasha—the soldier-scholar who led the Jordanian Arab Legion in the desert for decades. He had spent a lifetime watching power rise and eventually decline. And when he finally put pen to paper, he had marshaled the history of many nations and their cycles.

Glubb saw the pattern.

The essay was called “The Fate of Empires.” And its central claim is the sort of thing that helps you see the world in a different way. In this case: Empires fall rather on schedule.

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Recent democratic socialist victories in New York are a harbinger. Like an invasive species sent from the unproductive activist class, they have infiltrated politics at the highest levels of government. As if the creatures who have been ruling us weren’t bad enough, a fifty-year period of permitting socialist activists to take comfort in the academy is now yielding poisonous fruit.

And as we celebrate the 250th birthday of America, the democratic socialists openly wipe their asses with America’s founding documents. That is, until election season, when the wolves don sheep’s clothing.

Democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier stands out for both the volume and illiberal nature of her social media posts. She ran a now-deleted Twitter/X account (archived by the Wayback Machine). From 2018–2022, Chevalier celebrated “a world without borders—just like a world without prisons or police,” called for her comrades to “seize the means of production,” and wrote that “ALL PIGS EVERYWHERE ARE HARAM”. Chevalier also mocked interracial relationships by urging that brown men were “fetishizing ugly colonizer women.” And, of course, she openly supported the nationalization of industries.

Those who believe her views have evolved are fools. She merely tossed her Twitter account out of the Overton Window, took refuge in the Motte and Bailey, and ran for public office.

So, what should be done?

The answer, or current lack of any coherent answer, reveals a paradox about liberalism—at least the more cosmopolitan variety. That is, cosmopolitan liberalism claims a basic republican form of representative government—operating purportedly under the rule of law—and then bolts on basic rights, freedoms, and responsibilities meant not only to extend to everyone in its polity, but to everyone on earth. Hence: cosmopolitan.

But as we have argued in these pages, liberalism is asymmetrical when compared to other doctrines, such as socialism, which is imperialist. We need not just look at the handiwork of Lenin and Stalin to see why. We need only reread Darializa Avila Chevalier’s old social media posts to see exactly what she wants.

Or just read their platform.

Democratic socialism is just socialism. According to Marx, socialism is the step right before full communism in his upside-down dialectic. Not only is democracy in and of itself unsustainable, but the term is also just peanut butter around socialism’s bitter pill. That is, like the UK’s Fabians, the DSA are willing to use the democratic republican system to gain power. They will bide their time until they gain power sufficient to dismantle the system from within. They care not a jot about “basic rights, freedoms, and responsibilities.” They are takers. Of power. Of resources. Like the kissing cousins they claim to hate—the fascists—they are predators and parasites who view expropriation and violence as the highest goods.

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So they are not like competitors in a marketplace of ideas, or constrained contestants operating within a republican framework. They are enemies. And they will not hesitate to tear down the liberal order that enables their rise.

As I set out last week in my discussion of Cooperatopia, democratic socialists are not interested in cooperation. They are interested in domination. This is why they are such strange bedfellows with Islamists. The only thing that binds their coalition together is a common hatred of Israel, the Jews, and the West. When this winning coalition overtook Iran in 1979, the Islamists ended up murdering all the socialists who helped them take power.

So, we must return to the question: What should be done?

We must inoculate ourselves through relentless sunlight and cultural renewal. Archive and contrast us with the radicals’ records—such as Chevalier’s calls to abolish borders, prisons, and police, and to seize production—against their polished campaigns. We must continue to reform education via choice and competition to instill classical liberal virtues: rationality, toleration bounded by reciprocity, individual responsibility, and stewardship. Vitally, we must propagate parallel institutions—homeschool networks, private academies, and voluntary associations—which can be accelerated without central mandates. And of course, we must promote underthrow narratives: functional alternatives in crypto, mutual aid, churches, and fraternal orders that demonstrate that cooperation is not only good but always outperforms domination.

Politically, we must enforce strict reciprocity and fundamental liberal laws without abandoning liberalism. Apply existing laws symmetrically against incitement, material support for violence, or foreign influence. Tie public office, funding, and ballot access to explicit commitments to liberal norms—renouncing expropriation and political violence—while preserving open debate. Strengthen federalism, term limits, transparency, and sound money reforms to starve their dependency machines. Federal and state subsidy of higher education must end. We must also decentralize authority so that capture in one jurisdiction invites competition from others, turning concentrated local failures into visible warnings. Of course, if we must operate according to ‘democracy,’ we must never allow partisans to launder our tax dollars through NGOs, or allow election rigging to continue in our midst.

Ultimately, though, we must apply political apoptosis through radical decentralization. Building parallel systems—tokenized communities, encrypted networks, and virtue-based fraternal/sororal societies—will embody liberal principles and enable people to vote with their UHauls more easily. Illiberal doctrines thrive on centralized hosts, after all. Distributed sovereignty lets failed subsystems wither as vitality flows to more resilient edges. Socialists enter as predators exploiting tolerance. A muscular liberal response is not to mirror them but to outcompete them: Unleash economic performance, renew our culture, enforce neutrality and accountability for stewarding the rule of law, and create an abundance of options for opting out.

On America’s 250th anniversary, we must recommit to the experimental nature of the Founders’ republic—not by conquest, but by making illiberal predation unviable. And if the republic falls, we must take our blueprint—the civilizational code—with which a Remnant can rebuild in the ashes.

We, that is, you and I, are the stewards of that code.

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They share a peculiar passion. They love a certain kind of game. They call it Cooperation—the art of working together, as effectively as possible, for mutual gain. So they plant a flag on the island. They name the place Coopertopia. And they send out a call: Come build with us.

Others like them answer.

Thirty years pass. A million souls now call the island home. The civilization hums. The people are happy. By every measure that matters, it works.

Then the world notices.

And the world starts moving in, arriving on boats.

Who’s arriving? Migrants from the developing world—places poorer, harsher, less free. And they bring a different game. It’s not Cooperation. It’s Domination.

So, call them the Dominators. But understand—they aren’t all the same. Some are Economic Dominators. To them, private property is unjust. Every resource should be seized and divided equally, by force if necessary.

Others are Religious Dominators. To them, peace arrives only when every human submits to the One True Faith. Theirs. Without exception.

So, different dominator doctrines, but the same instinct: Rule, or be ruled.

Now, the Cooperators are a liberal people. Tolerant. Open-minded and willing to extend a hand. But here’s the bitter irony: the Dominators are fleeing the very lands their own cultures built. Destitute lands. Failed lands. It’s why they left.

And far too many of them didn’t leave their culture or values behind. They packed their domination games and brought them on board.

The Cooperators could have said no, but they didn’t. They wanted to be tolerant and accepting, after all. “Let them settle. Let them stay. Surely they’ll see what we built. Surely they’ll want to play our game, too,” they thought.

Fast forward.

The Dominators have more babies. And more arrive—through trafficking syndicates, through chain migration, families sent for, then their families’ families.

Until one day the arithmetic flips. The Dominators outnumber the Cooperators.

Coopertopia never guarded its border. So, Coopertopia got dominated.

The civilization they dreamed of—then labored a lifetime to raise—falls. Crime increased. Prosperity cratered. The political system got subverted from within by a coalition of Economic Dominators and Religious Dominators. Today, the cooperation games are over.

The Economic Dominators want the Cooperators’ stuff. The Religious Dominators want their souls.

And the Cooperators?

They sit in the detritus and ask the only question left: “Where did we go wrong? How could anyone not see it? Didn’t they understand that peaceful cooperation was the whole point—the thing that made this place worth coming to in the first place?”

Apparently not.

A Dominator sees the world as a fixed pie—a zero-sum game. The only way up is to push someone else down. And from the hour they stepped ashore, that was the game they played—patiently, quietly, all the way to the top. The Cooperators kept waiting for them to come around.

They never did.

Now the Cooperators stare out at the horizon and wonder: “Is there another island out there? Undiscovered. Unsettled. A place to begin again?”

Maybe there is. And maybe, this time, they’ll put something important first. Because they’ll finally understand what it was for.

In any case… It’s too late for Coopertopia.

But it doesn’t have to be too late for us.

So what about now? What about the West?

Western countries are not exactly Coopertopia. They’re mixed, and so pretty mixed up. And currently, they are culturally and politically divided along fault lines that promise to fracture us even more.

Too many Americans are oikophobic, which means they hate their country and its story. Couple that fact with the deep, deep debts, and we have to consider the real possibility that we are in the process of breaking up.

Of course, we should endeavor to preserve our free polities. But if we were to divide into more separate and independent states, we would have to consider just what that would mean.

For example, if some US states were to organize into free polities while others organized into socialist societies, we would have to rethink and clarify our notions of borders, allegiances, and shared values.

We might even want to revive the idea of a social contract—only this time, it couldn’t be theoretical. It would be something you would sign or not. And each of us would have to adopt or reject the rights and responsibilities not just of citizenship, but of membership. Because you see, the Zohran Mamdanis of the world should never be permitted to hold that much power inside a free polity.

Indeed, if a polity is truly free, no one should be permitted to hold that much power.

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It started in a London coffee house in the 1680s. Merchants and ship captains crowded the tables, and somewhere between the gossip and the gambling, they began betting on the things everyone else was afraid of. Hurricanes. Pirates. Ships lost at sea. Three hundred years later, the same place would ensure Bruce Springsteen's voice and the legs of a Hollywood actress.

It’s called Lloyd’s, and most people think it’s an insurance company. But it’s something stranger and far more interesting. Lloyd’s is a risk marketplace. And buried in how Lloyd’s works is a schematic for reinventing government itself.

The Risk Market

All life involves risk. This unavoidable fact keeps things interesting at least.

If you were to walk into Lloyd’s, you wouldn’t find a corporate suit deciding what your policy costs. You’d find syndicates—scores of competing teams with capital and expertise—each one sizing up the risk and arriving at a market price.

Want to insure an oil tanker? A satellite launch? A vineyard against frost or blight?

Multiple syndicates bid. When a risk is too big for any one of them, they split it, each taking a slice of a bigger risk.

The mechanism is that the people putting up the money only profit when they assess the risk correctly. If they misjudge a hurricane season or underprice a fleet, they lose out. But if they read it better than anyone else, they get rich.

So the system does something radical. It takes risk assessment—the kind of thing we often hand to a government functionary—and turns it into a competition. But unlike government, the system rewards superior judgment and punishes poor predictions.

As with accountability loops, bad judgment gets punished—directly and relentlessly. Now, let’s hold onto that idea, because here’s what almost nobody asks:

Governance Capital Markets

Think about what government officials actually do all day. Strip away the speeches, ceremony, and mission creep, and an enormous amount of what bureaucrats do is risk management.

Will this building stand? Is this drug safe? Will this neighborhood be protected? Will this bridge hold?

Right now, officials answer those questions with a monopoly: a regulator, agency, or bureaucracy. There’s no competition, and—importantly—no accountability loop when the monopoly screws up. In other words, when the agency gets it wrong, the agency doesn’t pay. You do.

So imagine replacing the monopoly with a market.

Instead of a single regulator with monopoly authority, you’d have competing governance service providers who underwrite outcomes—putting their own capital on the line to bet that the building won’t collapse, the air will stay clean, or the streets will get safer. Citizens, businesses, and investors back the syndicates they trust. And success isn’t measured by what gets promised during a campaign. It’s measured by what actually happens.

So, we replace rule-by-authority with governance-by-underwriting.

That sounds pretty abstract, so let’s make it a little more concrete.

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The Safety Test

Consider safety regulation—the thing most people can’t imagine without government officials intervening as middlemen.

Currently, a federal regulator writes the safety standard. Compliance is mandatory. If the standard turns out to be useless or costly, the regulator bears virtually no cost. They keep their building, their job, their budget, and their pension. They exist in what we have called an “accountability void.”

Now, imagine we introduce market forces, which is unfortunate shorthand for a set of individuals—like Lloyd’s syndicates—with strong incentives to get things right.

Insurers set the acceptable level of risk because insurers are the ones who have to pay when things go tits up. Businesses buy coverage from a syndicate of underwriters. Those underwriters develop safety standards not to satisfy a rulebook, but because catastrophes land on their balance sheets. The better your risk model, the more customers and capital you can attract.

Get it wrong, and you’re gone.

Now imagine…

• Building codes shaped by the people who would cut the check when the building burns (instead of a department that never pays a dime).

• Self-driving cars certified by underwriters staking real money on the accident rate (not an agency three technological generations behind).

• AI standards set by firms that are financially obligated to cover a catastrophic failure, so they have every incentive to understand the thing before it ships.

In each case, decision-making or regulation moves to those who must live with the consequences—that is, people with skin in the game.

The Pattern

See the pattern?

Imagine infrastructure syndicates that underwrite road quality and bridge safety, and profit by preventing collapse rather than billing taxpayers to clean it up.

Think about environmental syndicates that underwrite air quality and wildfire risk, investing in prevention because every acre that burns is a claim against them.

What about education syndicates that underwrite outcomes—financing schools, apprenticeships, and training programs, and earning their return only when students actually succeed?

Or imagine public safety syndicates that underwrite reductions in crime while remaining free to experiment with prevention, technology, and community programs, competing on two brutally honest metrics: civil rights protections and lower crime?

The through-line is this: In every case, the provider eats the cost of failure, and prevention pays better than neglect. Otherwise, everything is open to investors who provide capital or help measure and mitigate risk.

Governance as an Asset Class

Now, when we step back and regard this idea, something novel comes into focus.

Subscription government associations would raise capital the way startups do. Citizens steer their tax dollars—or governance subscriptions—toward providers they trust. Investors back the governance entrepreneurs with the sharpest models. The ones that deliver value grow. The ones that fail lose their asses, making room for those with better judgment.

We already have a name for this in another domain. Venture capital finances entrepreneurs who build better products. This would be governance capital—financing entrepreneurs who build better public outcomes.

It’s a similar function, only aimed at the parts of society everybody always assumed were off-limits to it.

So, where does all this lead?

The Long View

Government doesn’t vanish overnight. (Would that this were so.) But it changes its job description. Government, as we know it, stops being the operator of everything and becomes the platform—a legal layer that protects rights, enforces contracts, and audits the results. The referee instead of the player. I’m fully aware that competition in these areas would likely generate far better results, as well.

But, baby steps.

At least with this step, governance itself becomes a living ecosystem: underwriters, investors, operators, and citizens are all competing and cooperating, with their incentives more closely aligned, and are exposed to the consequences of being wrong.

And with that, we can rewrite one of the oldest questions in politics.

Instead of Who should govern us? We ask: Who is willing to put their capital at risk to produce a better outcome?

One of those questions is answered with a stump speech. The other is answered with certificates of risk.

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So, a principle surfaces:

This is part of a philosophy developed by an entrepreneur named Chris Rufer. He calls it the Philosophy of Human Respect. And the really interesting thing is, he built a successful enterprise on that very philosophy.

In other words, Rufer understands that a thriving business, like a flourishing civilization, is ultimately built on cooperative relationships. Given that reality, he wanted to know: How can we reorganize society to better facilitate cooperative relationships?

A World Without Bosses

Compulsion, whether in threatening violence or holding someone’s job over his head, diminishes his agency, his sense of personal efficacy, and ultimately his happiness.

So, Rufer decided to build his business on three fundamental principles:

• First, don’t threaten;

• Then, honor your commitments.

• And finally, the mission—not the man—is the boss…

Sounds impossible, right? Well, consider that the Morning Star Packing Company produces the majority of tomato paste products in the United States. The facilities are massive, and Morning Star employs thousands of people.

Yet many businesses are NOT built that way. In fact, many businesses are built on command-and-control hierarchies that run counter to these principles. That is, most businesses run on different assumptions, namely: Threatening employees frightens them into compliance with the boss’s orders; The boss’s commands are far more important than the employee’s commitments to serve the mission, and the boss is the boss—the mission is just feel-good fluff they talk about at the company picnic.

Yet Rufer has proven his happiness hypothesis over and over again at Morning Star Packing Company. So, he wants to take it further. Rufer wants to know: Can we banish the threat to compel or coerce the innocent from all social life? Can we take free cooperation to a societal scale?

Okay, so I want to answer that question, not just by answering in the affirmative. I also want to talk about how such a crazy idea might work for society.

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Subscription Government

For a lot of people, this crazy idea will sound crazier than the modern republic must have sounded to King George III. But bear with me. This podcast is dedicated to overcoming failures of imagination. In this case, the idea is called “panarchy,” which sounds weird. You won’t find that term in a Super Bowl ad. Instead, let’s call it “subscription government.”

In other words, what if, instead of registering with a political party, each adult subscribed to a governance association? Imagine also that there weren’t just two governance associations, but two hundred. All would be competing for your membership. This array of options would give Americans far more choices about how they live their lives, with whom they conduct their business, and what kind of contribution they want to make to their communities and to society.

It would also create tighter accountability loops for everything. Instead of fighting against those who would shove their way down yours and everyone else’s throats, you would join up with people who share your life philosophy. Then, any conflicts between governance associations would be settled in court.

Examples

Okay, this is still pretty abstract at this point. So let’s look at some examples. To keep things simple, let’s imagine the menu for bundled subscription services had only three items: Welfare, Justice, and Education.

Association A offers comprehensive social Welfare benefits, such as health coverage, unemployment insurance, and retirement. A’s Justice package covers legal protection in the event you are arrested or sued. And A’s Education component covers all member-children’s education benefits through college. Association A charges each member 10 percent of income, up to $150,000, then 15 percent for those earning more.

Association B emphasizes self-responsibility, personal ownership, and freedom of choice. B’s Welfare package provides catastrophic health coverage, health savings accounts, individual retirement funds, and unemployment savings plans supplemented by a voluntary mutual-aid network. B’s Justice package focuses on legal defense, property-rights protection, contract enforcement, and private arbitration services. And B’s Education component funds students rather than institutions. B charges based on an à la carte arrangement, but ends up being between 8-10 percent of income, with exceptions for low-income subscribers.

Monopolies Suck

Getting the idea?

In school, we learned that monopolies are bad for consumers. Higher costs, lower quality, and no alternatives. Governments are just monopolies with guns and jails. But competition, which includes the option to leave the association, creates tighter accountability loops.

You also wouldn’t have to move out of state to avail of such services. Most of the federal government would become obsolete. States and local governments might continue to cover infrastructure, policing, and emergency services. Or, various region-specific governance associations would pop up to compete for your membership at the local level. Different associations offer different service bundles.

Skeptical?

If you’re still skeptical that entrepreneurship in governance services is possible, or think that government must be some monolithic ‘all things to all people,’ then why not just legalize Subscription Governance and see what happens? All it would take is making it easy for individuals to opt out of one system and into another.

Look, maybe I am crazy. Maybe the wildly successful Chris Rufer is, too. But at least Rufer has demonstrated that uncompelled cooperation based on colleagues’ commitments and accountabilities can scale beyond what anyone ever thought possible. If we agree that you threatening innocent people with violence to get your way is wrong, we have to consider that politicians threatening people to get their way are probably wrong, too. But if humanity had an opportunity to try subscription governance services, it might just work.

And it might just be the right thing to do.

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Disclosure: I work for the Foundation for Harmony and Prosperity, a charitable entity established by Chris Rufer.

You’ve heard of a feedback loop. The thermostat is a classic example. It senses the room, compares the reading to the target, and then acts to close the gap. Output bends back to become input. The system corrects itself because information about how it’s doing reaches the part that can do something about it.

Now consider a particular kind of feedback loop, the kind bound up with human performance. Call it an accountability loop. Its defining feature is that the person responsible for an outcome feels its consequences. Do well, and good things follow. Fail, and the failure lands on you.

The signal returns to its source.

Its opposite is an accountability void—a position from which you can wield real power over other people’s lives while remaining structurally insulated from the results. The decisions flow outward, but the consequences never flow back.

The Unaccountable Class

Modern society is increasingly run by a class of people who exercise power but rarely absorb the cost of being wrong or failing to deliver value. Most bureaucrats, managers, academics, media figures, and institutional elites are unaccountable. They set the rules, shape the discourse, and direct enormous resources. When their actions prove disastrous, they are usually still in the room a year later, often promoted.

Contrast this with those who are more accountable: the entrepreneur, the tradesman, the small business owner. These people encounter reality frequently. A restaurant that disappoints empties out. A contractor who builds badly loses the next job. A founder who misreads the market runs out of money. The feedback is direct, swift, and individualized.

Nassim Taleb calls this “skin in the game,” the idea that no one should be allowed to make decisions without sharing in the downside. A Roman engineer who slept under his own arch had skin in the game. An economist who designs a healthcare policy, but faces no penalty when it fails, does not.

This asymmetry is the central phenomenon behind a remarkable amount of what ails society. The collapse of trust in institutions, the rise of an aloof technocracy, the dreary procession of policy failures for which nobody is ever held responsible—all are due to relative accountability voids. The political backlash that inevitably follows is slow, indirect, and far too loose to be effective. People are reacting to the sense that the authorities governing their lives are no longer answerable to them.

Popular frustration can manifest in counterproductive ways.

Political scientists Theodore Lowi and Hugh Heclo described versions of this dynamic decades ago: Congress repeatedly responded to new problems by creating new administrative bodies and delegating authority to them, producing a sprawling system of governance that increasingly operated through agencies, experts, and policy networks beyond the direct control of the people or elected legislators. This managerial regime lies at the center of the Unaccountable Class.

Relatedly, many corporate functionaries and bureaucrats are ordered to pursue specific means to achieve an objective but are denied the autonomy to do so. Yet they are still held accountable for failure.

This, too, is messed up.

Anatomy of an Accountability Loop

If we want to repair this—across every sphere and at every scale—we have to get specific. You cannot find the broken loops until you know precisely what an intact loop looks like. So here is the full thing, laid out in its parts.

An agent—a person responsible for some activity—commits to a mission and to a defined set of objectives that connect to that mission. That commitment is not a vibe or a vague aspiration; it functions as a binding agreement, with the structure:

If the agent performs and achieves X, the agent receives Y. If the agent underperforms and fails to achieve X, the agreement has been broken, so the agent receives less and may be asked to vacate the position, because the position was conditioned on X from the start.

Notice what each piece is doing. The explicit objective makes “doing well” measurable rather than rhetorical. The binding agreement converts an aspiration into an enforceable claim. And the final clause—that the role itself is contingent—is the one we most often forget to install. A loop with no exit is not a loop.

If failure cannot cost you your seat, you are not accountable; you are merely employed.

The Simplest Loop

The most reliable way to manufacture an accountability loop is also the oldest: a client-vendor relationship. One party judges the other’s performance by their own standards and their own satisfaction, and—crucially—retains the power to walk away. The vendor who stops meeting the client's needs loses the client. Exit, as the economist Albert Hirschman argued, is often a sharper instrument than voice. Complaining to your provider is weak tea next to the credible threat of taking your business elsewhere.

This is precisely why I’ve argued elsewhere for what I call Subscription Governance Services (stay tuned): arrangements in which people contract with governance providers and can switch to a competitor if the provider underperforms. The point is not to commodify everything sacred about public life. The point is to restore the missing linkage—to give the governed something the governed have largely lost, which is a meaningful way for their dissatisfaction to reach the people responsible, change their behavior, or send them packing.

A Comprehensive Program

What we need, then, is a comprehensive system of accountability loops. The method is straightforward to talk about, though execution is harder. Identify the dynamics that keep entrepreneurs, workers, and business owners honest—the direct feedback, the binding commitments, the contingent tenure, the enduring possibility of exit—and import those dynamics into the domains currently run by bureaucrats, managers, academics, media figures, and institutional elites.

We should be honest that this is not a simple tune-up. Importing real accountability would transform certain roles, and some might not survive intact, because certain bureaucratic, managerial, and institutional roles are defined by their insulation from consequences.

Their comfort is the void.

At best, many of them rest on feedback so fuzzy and loosely coupled that it barely deserves the name: the periodic popularity contests we call elections, which are blunt instruments indeed for evaluating the thousands of unelected functionaries who actually make most of the decisions.

If I had to name a single lens capable of doing the most to renew Western civilization, it would be this one. Look at everything—every office, every institution, every seat of power—and ask the same question: When this fails, who feels it? When the answer is “no one who decided,” you have found an accountability void.

And with it, you have found the place where reform must begin.

The trouble is, where there is no accountability, there is power—the power to act with impunity.

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Yet women report being profoundly unhappy. Birth rates are collapsing.

Most educated men say they want equal partners, yet feel a crushing pressure to out-earn them. Most women hold high standards for a potential partner even as they support more gender parity in elite positions.

Nobody planned this. Nobody asked for it.

It is what happens when two forces pull in opposite directions, and we insist on pretending only one of them is real.

The Biological Substrate

Let’s start with what the data keeps showing, no matter how uncomfortable it makes anyone. Women tend toward hypergamy, meaning they tend to select partners of equal or higher social status. This is not a stereotype about modern women on TikTok. It is one of the most replicated findings in evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics.

Prof. David Buss’s cross-cultural research spanning dozens of societies has found that women consistently weigh a partner’s resources and social standing far more heavily than men do. Subsequent studies using speed dating, online matching platforms, and revealed-preference data have confirmed that the pattern holds even when women explicitly report otherwise.

The evolutionary logic is not hard to reconstruct.

For most of human history, a woman’s reproductive investment was asymmetrical, including gestation, nursing, and years of intensive care. A preference that weighed a partner’s provisioning and status was not cultural conditioning; it was a condition of survival. A preference built up over hundreds of thousands of years does not dissolve in a few decades of cultural or policy change. Let’s call this ‘the biological substrate.’ It doesn’t strictly determine behavior, but it shapes the gravitational field within which choices get made.

The Cultural Imperative

Now, let’s layer in the second force. Over the past fifty years, women have flooded into higher education and elite professions. In the United States, women now earn more bachelor’s and master’s degrees than men. Female median earnings have risen sharply relative to male earnings, and today, women occupy the majority of managerial positions in several industries.

This is not merely cultural change. It is a demographic transformation, and it has real downstream effects on how people meet and mate.

The Arithmetic

If hypergamy is a real and powerful tendency, and women are now the majority of the educated class, then mathematically, a growing number of highly educated women are looking for an even more accomplished partner, and finding a shrinking pool.

Sociologists and economists studying educational assortative mating have found that rising female educational attainment does not simply change labor markets. It also reshapes the dating and marriage market. Because people tend to partner with others of similar education levels, the growing number of highly educated women relative to highly educated men has reduced the prevalence of traditional hypergamous pairings and altered the set of available matches at the top of the education distribution.

Note, again, that this is a structural observation.

The sociocultural influence of gender equality and women's elite participation is real. So is its friction with the biological substrate.

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The Paradox

The collision between the biological substrate, on the one hand, and the cultural imperative, on the other, produces a paradox with demographic consequences. The countries with the highest gender-equality indices—including Nordic nations, South Korea, and Japan's urban centers—tend to have among the lowest birth rates on Earth. Causation is complex, and no one should reduce the matter to a single mechanism, but the pattern is there: as women gain the freedom to select partners on their own terms and to participate fully in elite professional culture, fertility tends to fall.

This is not because women are broken or selfish. It is because the conditions that make partnership and parenthood feel viable have narrowed. There is also a subtler personal cost. A woman who genuinely wants both a serious career and a serious partnership may find herself at thirty-eight having achieved one and mourning the absence of the other, not through bad choices, but through the quiet accumulation of mismatched incentives no one has clearly articulated.

This paradox does not mean modernity is somehow bad. It means we have accepted unprecedented freedom and gender equality without being honest about the tensions they generate with the biological substrate.

The Male Bind

Men are not outside this paradox; they are simply in it differently. Most men, surveyed honestly, say they support gender equality, and they mean it. But when pressed, they also report intense pressure to out-earn their partner, to have succeeded as a provider before pursuing a serious relationship, and to be visibly high-status in a world where the old markers of status are simultaneously derided.

This creates a bind.

Men get the message that the old status hierarchies are obsolete, yet they are still being judged against those hierarchies by potential partners, by the culture, and by their own lights. A man who earns less than his partner is not guaranteed to feel diminished, but the data on male psychological outcomes relative to breadwinner status suggests that many do. The modern script says one thing, while the biological gravity pulls in the opposite direction. Dismantling a hierarchy does not mean anyone will remain unaffected by its structural rearrangement.

The Resolution

So what do we do about all this? We cannot just pretend either force away. People who insist that hypergamy is purely patriarchal conditioning are fighting the replication record of evolutionary psychology. Yet those who insist that women’s ambitions are the problem refuse to see two generations of data on human flourishing.

The actual work before us is hard. We have to thread the needle: to build a culture that honors both the biological imperative and contemporary values without demanding that people suppress either. Concretely, that means treating family formation, culturally and institutionally, as an elite and venerated aspiration. It means that men who are present fathers and women who build careers are both honored, rather than being arranged into zero-sum frames in which one achievement diminishes the other.

It means acknowledging that, deep down, most women want partners of competence and status and eventually to be mothers. Most men want eventually to be fathers, protectors, and providers. It means being more honest with young people about the timing pressures that biology imposes, not as a guilt trip, but as information they can use to navigate all this. And it means letting couples build asymmetrical, flexible arrangements, one partner more career-focused for a time, without status penalties attached to either choice.

Respecting that grain does not mean imposing cultural imperatives that run roughshod over either sex’s biology. The tension between the biological substrate and cultural change is less a problem to solve than a condition to navigate, with honesty, support, and the courage to stop pretending either force of gravity isn’t real. That may mean women learn to indulge the hypergamous instinct in ways other than a partner’s income, and men learn to demonstrate competence in ways other than their salary.

The developed world’s demographic winter is here in part because we elevated egalitarian careerism over the biological imperatives that were always there, and refused to discuss the tension openly. Articulating the paradox clearly, the pull of evolution, the gains of liberation, and the friction between them, is not a reactionary position. It is the start of actually thinking about what it means to be free as men and women while sustaining our population into the future.

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Friedrich Hayek spent much of his later life thinking about a tension at the heart of civilization. The rules that make large-scale social life possible are often not the ones our evolved instincts would tend to generate on their own. Humans evolved for life in small, familiar groups, but eventually we learned to live within a far more impersonal civilization—one sustained by property, contract, law, and market exchange, and by standards of conduct that no one designed.

That order did not arise from a blueprint or command. Hayek argued that it emerged gradually, through a process of cultural evolution in which groups, institutions, and practices that fostered coordination tended to persist, while others disappeared. Property rights, the rule of law, and market discipline are not really expressions of our evolved nature, but cultural achievements that can restrain and sometimes redirect that nature.

That insight still has force, but it leaves a critical question open.

Hayek was clear about how an extended order can emerge and endure. But how do different social orders, moral systems, or patterns of life coexist within the same society? He understood the tension between spontaneous order (cosmos) and deliberate organization (taxis), but he said less about what it means when incompatible ways of life must share the same country, metropolis, or neighborhood.

Because that is the situation in the developed world. And friction follows.

Misplaced Values and Norms

The family runs on love, sacrifice, and unconditional belonging. The market runs on exchange, prices, and choices. The state runs on forced conformity and compliance. A religious community runs on shared devotion and holy authority. Each of these systems is, on its own terms, a triumph—a hard-won solution to a real coordination problem. The trouble starts when one of them wanders outside its territory. Indeed, when we look closely at many of the conflicts that pervade modern life, a pattern emerges.

Familial loyalty is a beautiful thing within a clan. Move it into a public office, and you get corruption. The logic of the market is extraordinary at allocating software and steel. Let it govern friendship or parenthood, and you get something cold, transactional, and a little monstrous—a life where everything has a price, but very little has worth. Bureaucratic universalism, when applied to an intimate community, flattens everything that made the community flourish.

Mix in a little ideological fervor, and a society can lapse into incoherence.

So the questions we need to ask are not the ones we keep asking. We argue endlessly about which norm is correct, as though one of them should prevail and rule the rest. But values and norms shouldn’t compete for a single sovereign scepter. They evolved for different functions, just as a heart or a kidney did.

Put simply: The question is not which set of values is best; The question is where each belongs.

Spheres for Evolved Instincts

There’s a temptation—call it the temptation of High Modernism—to treat our tribal instincts as errors. Belonging, loyalty, the pull toward an ingroup get coded as atavisms to be trained out of us, intellectual embarrassments on the road to a rational cosmopolitan future. Such a future is just waiting to be contrived by those who possess the One True Way.

But instincts evolved because they solved problems, too, and those problems haven’t all vanished. People need to belong to something smaller than all of humanity. They need loyalty, identity, reciprocity, and the concentrated local trust that lets you leave your door unlocked. A civilization that tries to abolish these doesn’t achieve enlightenment. It finds isolation, incoherence, or forced conformity. Eventually, human instincts return in their ugliest forms, because what we refuse to house in a healthy structure returns as something feral.

The objective, then, is not to overcome our tribal natures. It is to nest them—to let them find expression in their proper spheres and keep them from colonizing the spheres where they could do real damage. Civilization works when various instincts and institutions are restricted to their proper functional roles. None should seek to swallow up everything else in ideological or cultural imperialism, unless, of course, we build an empire of the mind upon the Covenant.

Such, of course, reframes the entire project of politics. Before us, then, lies an opportunity, bold but fragile, to evolve.

From Rules to Metarules

The classical question—which set of values should prevail?—assumes a society can and should converge on a grand answer. But there is no grand answer. People differ in their capacities, aptitudes, and cultures. Yet differences can go too far. In an excessively pluralistic world, where certain values and norms are not just different but incommensurable, society breaks down.

Let that sink in. Some value systems are commensurable. Others are not. This is a brute fact that too many universalists fail to acknowledge.

The profound achievement of humans will be to learn to hold first-order values and second-order values at the same time, to the extent that the latter create space for the former in a condition of peace.

So the questions have to move up a level.

Questions about which system should prevail must first yield to: What peoples, systems, and cultures can coexist without devouring one another? And, what governs the boundaries among them?

What we need, in other words, are not just better rules but better metarules—principles that govern the interactions among first-order rule-systems and cultures.

Philosopher Robert Nozick glimpsed a version of this in his “utopia of utopias,” a framework whose only content was the freedom to build, join, and leave smaller ‘utopias.’ His instinct was right. Today, it needs to be carried out of theoryland and into our broader cultural life.

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Nested Membranes

But in returning to Hayek’s cultural evolution, no culture, much less any built atop a set of metarules, has yet evolved in a form capable of transcending politics and conflict. We must try to build that culture from theory today and try living it locally tomorrow, but it will either take hold or it won’t.

Such is evolution.

Indeed, a healthy society looks like an ecosystem. Biology already solved a version of this problem billions of years ago. A cell maintains itself with a membrane, which is a porous boundary. The membrane is what lets the cell stay itself while still exchanging with the world around it—admitting what it needs, expelling what it doesn’t, and in doing so, preserving what’s worth protecting on the inside. Cells nest into organs, organs into organisms, organisms into ecosystems. At every sphere and scale, the same pattern recurs. A boundary forms, porous enough to permit exchange, but firm enough to preserve identity and functional integrity of the system it encloses.

Human communities can and should be built the same way.

People gather around shared values and ways of life. Membership follows commensurability—you join what comports with your idea of the good life. The boundaries between communities function as membranes rather than walls: they keep differences alive while allowing people, ideas, and goods to pass through. Of course, some people, ideas, and goods will have to be expelled. Such is life. Individuals nest in families, families in communities, communities in regions, regions in civilizations. The health of the whole arrangement depends almost entirely on the quality of those interface rules—on how well the membranes work.

The future, in this picture, belongs neither to the homogenizers who want one global monoculture nor to the fragmenters who want every group sealed behind a wall. It belongs to nested differentiation and commensurability. Many forms of life, distinct and intact, can be held within a larger order that allows them to flourish without dissolving into one another or battling for dominance. And those ideologies whose primary rules are expansionist, such as Islam or Communism, must be kept outside the outermost membrane of social life. Such is not to say there shouldn’t be local communes within a larger ecosystem. That is to say—if its operating principle is to become the ecosystem—the worldview is invasive to the outermost covenantal sphere, and must be rejected.

More than Metarules

But metarules alone won’t do, and this is the part theorists tend to miss. People do not bleed for procedures. No one has ever sacrificed for a boundary-management protocol. Stable civilizations are held together by stories, symbols, virtues, and sacred commitments—by things felt, not merely things agreed to.

So the potential power beneath all of this is cultural. What kind of culture can contain many cultures at once? It cannot be cultural relativism. That view implies that every way of life is as good as every other, and commensurability either doesn’t matter or must somehow be compelled by authorities. Nor can our metarule be a universalism that quietly insists everyone conform to a vague monoculture that celebrates diversity and inclusion while ignoring real frictions. Such universalisms tend to ignore the need for reciprocity, as in We will tolerate you as long as you tolerate us. But systems that make room for ideological imperialism will end up dominated by ideological imperialists.

So this has to be something else. Something newer. An upgraded liberalism.

What awaits us must include an ecological sensitivity to culture itself, in which what can be integrated is integrated, but what cannot must be viewed with open eyes. A superordinate culture, capable of holding multiple value systems in view at once, recognizing what each one is for, and resisting the itch to make any single worldview the measure of all the rest. If this existed, it would look something like a culture of reciprocal pluralism. It would integrate only what is integrable, and only at the appropriate sphere and scale, perhaps according to a subsidiarity rule.

Almost certainly, the culture would start with whether someone is willing to be bound by the Covenant.

Then, such a culture would cultivate its own virtues, identify its vices, and say plainly what can be accepted within, and what must be rejected from, the corpus of a coherent, diverse, and peaceful society.

That’s what makes such a project so difficult.

Thinking this way, much less living this way, takes a level of developmental maturity many people never reach. Most people are stuck in first-order cultural or ideological imperialism. The capacity to take on another’s perspective without losing your own must be cultivated, and it is a capacity only a few possess. But perhaps those few can multiply, enough to create a powerful, transformative bloc.

It also takes sensitivity to invisible membranes—spheres of life great and small—coming to know where one sphere ends, and another begins. Nested belonging requires learning to see these invisible spheres and subspheres. It means developing not just a sense of responsibility for one’s local tribe, but for the whole living, integrated array of tribes. And in that arrangement, though decidedly not utopian, we would have to find something sacred. Something more like this: a deep reverence for the harmonization of difference to the degree difference can be harmonized, but no further.

A Different Figure

Every age has its hero. The first-order cultures—the ones still playing the old game—produce revolutionaries, conquerors, and technocrats, each certain that their order should win and rule the rest.

Each seeks domination.

The age now arriving requires a different figure. We might call him a steward of membranes—or perhaps what Alexander Bard calls a shamanoid. The shamanoid’s work is not conquest but rather the patient tending of the interfaces between worlds. His task is to preserve difference without friction and fragmentation, and to unity without homogenization. He does not dream of the final victory of one form of life over all the others, but instead, the continuous harmonization of difference amid constant change.

He knows that domination games are just the diseases of politics and war, with all the pathologies built around first-order values and their zero-sum arrangements.

Civilization is not a contest to be won but an ecology to be conserved—an unfinished arrangement of evolving norms and forms, each within its place, each contained within some larger sphere that does not consume its nested spheres, respecting the membranics of time, place, and cultural circumstances within the Covenant.

Toward a Culture of Reciprocal Pluralism

1. Honor spheres. Recognize which values belong to which domains, and resist exporting them everywhere.

2. Cultivate nested loyalties. Belong fully to family, community, civilization, and humanity without collapsing any level into another.

3. Practice reciprocal pluralism. Extend toleration to those willing to return it. If not, be willing to eject them.

4. Differentiate before judging. Ask what function a norm serves before determining its value.

5. Build membranes, not walls. Create boundaries that preserve identity while permitting exchange.

6. Associate by commensurability. Form institutions with those who share enough to cooperate deeply for the Covenant.

7. Exit before conquest. When coexistence fails, seek separation before domination.

8. Reward maturity. Venerate and elevate those capable of perspective-taking across value systems.

9. Reject ideological imperialism. Oppose any movement bent on eliminating or absorbing its rivals, or the second-order superstructure.

10. Steward the membranes. Train shamanoid leaders who will guard the interfaces among cultural spheres.

11. Practice subsidiarity. Solve problems at the smallest sphere capable of solving them well.

12. Venerate harmonized diversity. Treat the flourishing of many peaceful forms of life within a larger order as an achievement worthy of reverence.

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Before scribes carved the first law into stone, before Hammurabi, the Twelve Tables, or the slow accumulation of common law through centuries of blood and friction, there had been the sacralization of persons. It began with the recognition that others suffer. It deepened into a commitment to refuse to do to others what you find hateful. And it implied reciprocity—not as a contract, but the unspoken syntax of a society.

Before there were codes, there were covenants. And in that reciprocal structure, we found the elements of a covenantal bond.

Some argue that to sacralize others is not a legal contrivance, but an ontological discovery. Rights are real, some insist. Rights are a derivation, others argue. We need not settle that debate. Every tradition that has ever produced wisdom—whether Mosaic, Stoic, Vedic, or Taoist—arrives at the same conclusion: To trespass upon others without cause is not merely a crime, it is a desecration.

Remember the story of monks meditating deep in a forest.

The sages embody the principle of ahimsa—nonviolence—the first of the Yamas, which means the practice of reining in or self-control. For the forest sages, ahimsa was not just an abstract ideal but an active practice. Their peacefulness radiated outward, creating an environment in which even the forest animals coexisted in peace. It is said that the tiger and cow drank side by side from the same stream while in the monks’ presence.

The very foundation of law, in every civilization that has not entirely lost its way, is an elaboration on this. One may not injure the innocent. One may not seize what is not his. One may not constrain a person without justification sufficient to meet the scrutiny of a free people who seek similar protections.

Therefore, the law should never be an instrument of subordination. It must be a covenant. The society built on such a covenant is better than a society built on mere statutes. This is no small thing. Most of human history is a lengthy record of the powerful acting with impunity against the weak. But this covenant, however imperfectly articulated or instantiated, is civilization’s most important achievement.

The Serpent’s Caveat

Every civilization has its serpents. The principle that no one is permitted to harm the innocent has always been subjected to catastrophic caveats by powerful men. Those who write the law do not regard themselves as accountable to it. Those who enforce the law are not held to the covenant.

Aggression’s architects insist their monopoly on violence is a necessary evil. Yet it is evil. And the compliant herds shiver, unable to imagine things working any other way.

Still, the powerful claim they must be the sole providers of security, law, and justice. Such a claim is rarely backed by force of argument—simply by force. Uniformed men with weapons and jails are proxies of the powerful. They make the people an offer they cannot refuse. When authorities confiscate the wealth of a man who has harmed no one, this is harm. When authorities imprison a woman for conduct that injures no one, such is the injury. When state proxies seize property without evidence of wrongdoing and without the victim’s consent, this is the work of brigands wearing costumes.

Suffering follows.

At least the costume is impressive. It has a seal, a flag, and chevrons. But the uniform grants ordinary men a license to commit acts that the covenant forbids ordinary men.

Ostrom saw clearly. Civilization’s greatest threat is neither the street criminal nor the rich man, but institutional power asymmetries made by statutes and standing armies that elevate some men above a covenant that ought to bind us all.

Agents of a monopoly on violence, though charged with producing security, soon learn that they can act with impunity. The monopoly produces an auction house in which politicians are the brokers, favor-seekers set the clearing prices, and voters are obliged to pay. The covenant gets consumed by the caveat. The sacred gets sold to the highest bidders. And those who once surrendered to the All now submit to Pharaoh.

We are the Remnant.

We greet the loss not with cynicism but grief. A protection racket wrapped in pageantry is still a protection racket. Those who understand what good the covenant unleashes and what evil it restrains grieve its absence, but this is temporary. When the time of grieving expires, the time for action arrives.

The Law of Consent

What would it mean to return to the covenant?

We take the Initiates’ Pledge and enshrine a simple principle:

All legitimate relationships between persons must be consensual.

This is the Law of Consent.

The wisemen of the past understood it intuitively, though described it variously as a Natural Right or a Divine Imprimatur every human bears. Let us not allow the ongoing conflict between Fidelis and Atheus to keep us from restoring the Covenant as our prime protocol. We need only consider the manner and extent to which we must derive it and apply it as mere humans. It must apply not only to the street, but to the chamber—not only to the criminal, but to the magistrate.

Consent is no procedural nicety. It is a precondition for peace that enables us to form a grand multilateral contract. It requires neither Divine Imprimatur nor Natural Right, but if these are mythic truths, believe them. They can only help us to sacralize one another. The Law of Consent only requires those who seek flourishing to adopt the following, which is rooted in instrumental rationality:

Morals by agreement.

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Notice this formulation requires neither commitment to abstract essences nor moral laws. One must only investigate the idea that happiness, harmony, and prosperity, the Threefold Braid, flow to those who enter the covenant. We don’t argue about its nature. We pray like monks and persuade like missionaries.

Those who agree, join us. And we get on with it.

Under the covenant, neither a person’s body nor time nor the fruits of her labor are resources to be allocated by her betters. Under the covenant, a fellow human is neither a milk cow nor an enemy. Under the covenant, persons treat persons as ends in themselves. Under the Law of Consent, we are united.

And this agreement, followed faithfully by all its signatories, reorganizes everything.

Government becomes governance.
Monopoly becomes polycentricity.
Compulsion yields to persuasion.

Outside the covenant, though, predators and parasites await. Whatever our dreams of universal morality, to them, we are prey or hosts. Whether we shake our fists or brandish our Divine Imprimaturs, the only answer to their power is counterpower. Rights confer no magical forcefield against criminals and tyrants. But when courageous people join in solidarity, there is strength in numbers.

There we find asabiyyah.

Under the covenant and Law of Consent, compulsion without evidence of injury is itself an injury, whether carried out by ordinary men in uniforms or plain clothes. It means that property is designated as an extension of personhood, and that violating it without consent is to violate the person. Violation or harm means making another worse off.

Agreements—freely made, clearly understood, and held to by all parties—are the architecture of a just society. And those entrusted with any power must hold it by the consent of those over whom they hold it, and remain accountable to them, replaceable by them, and constrained by the law they are appointed to enforce. Thus, a corollary:

No monopoly may enforce the Law of Consent.

This is no call to build a Utopia. It is a call to recover deep wisdom, form a new covenant, and build a new kind of society on that very covenant. Instead of deriving law from Leviathan, we derive all law from the Law of Consent. And everyone who signs it must abide by it. Otherwise, they subject themselves to enforcement measures.

The Demands

The Law of Consent demands things of us we have grown comfortable avoiding. The Protection Racket evolved into a Security Blanket as constituency groups bid for the legislature’s power or anoint powerful palms.

The Law of Consent demands that those who provide governance services demonstrate their value as providers and thus compete for our loyalties. A provider of governance services who cannot earn our custom is an occupying force. That means the institutions we build must be chosen, not inherited; entered into, not imposed. Institutions shall be sustained by fidelity to purpose, not just by the inertia of tradition.

The Law of Consent demands that punitive measures be justified by provable injury to a person—not by some sovereign taking offense, not by a policy that exists solely to enrich a constituency group or a corporate parasite, nor by the convenience of self-anointed administrators willing to sacrifice justice for compliance. Courts must ask not only what was done but who was harmed. Victims must be made whole. And restitution must come before punishment.

The Law of Consent demands that what we call the social contract be made actual—not hypothetical, not metaphorical, not implied by the accident of birth. The agreements by which we live together must be transparent, legible, signed sanely, and in the ink of circumspection.

The Law of Consent demands that infrastructure, community, and common life be built through negotiation rather than compulsion. Common projects are realized because they offer sufficient value to all whose property and persons they will affect, and impose no costs upon the unwilling. Even if this makes for a slower process, it is more honest, more durable, and less prone to resentments than communities under coercive control.

The Law of Consent demands competition among those who provide that which we associate with governance—security, adjudication, and infrastructure—because competition keeps providers honest. Monopoly, in governance as in other industries, is a midwife to twins: compulsion and corruption.

The Future

Fragments of a covenantal society have existed across many times and places. These include the free cities of the medieval era, the polycentric legal systems of early common law, and the guilds and mutual aid societies that existed before the rise of the administrative state. Lex mercatoria enabled merchants across a continent to conduct transactions independently of political interference. The Frankpledge system connected villages into mutual surety groups, in which each individual was accountable to his community. Ancient Israelite judges held no permanent power and were answerable to the same law they administered.

None was perfect. No human arrangement is. But they were, in their better ages, organized around something recognizable as the covenant: persons protecting persons, agreements enforcing agreements, harm met with restitution rather than mere punishment, and power distributed rather than concentrated.

The Remnant does not advocate for a return to the past. We are not nostalgists. We are something stranger and more demanding: those who believe in the timeless wisdom of reciprocal peace, and that today’s task is to instantiate it again at a higher order of complexity. Now we have better tools, more potential signatories, and a greater understanding of what we are trying to build and why.

The Law of Consent points to a civilization in which persons are genuinely sovereign over their lives, property, and self-organizing associations. Those who have decision-making authority will have earned it. They shall maintain it through value creation, or lose it due to poor performance. The ruler-ruled asymmetry will not be abolished by a violent revolution, as such risks swapping power factions. Power asymmetries dissolve, slowly and structurally, through subversive innovation.

Far from a call for political reform, this is our moral mission. Behind the covenant lies a spiritual imperative. A society organized around the sacredness of persons is one that takes seriously that which the most enduring wisdom traditions have taught.

The Charge

The distance between what is and what the covenant demands is vast and widening, but this is not cause for despair. It is our call to work—by recommitment to tikkun.

The Remnant does not wait for a sudden transformation. We experiment. We make agreements that instantiate consent rather than merely invoking it. We create communities—physical, intellectual, and spiritual—that demonstrate, in miniature, what a covenant-ordered society can be. We point at the convent, not as with a weapon against those who fall short of it, but as a light, something by which to orient in the dark.

Every tradition that treats persons as sacred rather than a means is an element of the society we are set to build. Every agreement, freely entered and faithfully kept, honors the whole of the covenant as hyperstition. Every time we hold the powerful to account for their crimes—judging them by the same standard as the powerless—is either an act of restoration or the work of repair. The law, in its best form, has always been the covenant of persons, protecting persons, from harm by other persons, including those who believe themselves exempt.

We have forgotten more than we remember. But the memory is not lost. It is carried forward, in every age, by those few who protect the flame as a candle in a windstorm.

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This piece first appeared at the Grey Robes.

The first says there may be multiple universes, which means you could be one of uncountably many versions of yourself, branching every moment into realities you will never see.

The second suggests that the world beneath your feet may not possess fully definite properties until physical interactions force them into definite states. Reality, in that sense, can begin to look strangely game-like or computational.

With possibilities this bizarre, physics and metaphysics start to blur. And if either picture is even approximately true, we live in a universe far stranger than common sense ever imagined.

The Branching World

Let’s start with David Deutsch. The Oxford physicist is one of the founding minds behind quantum computing, and probably the most committed defender of what’s called the many-worlds interpretation.

His argument is simple, but unsettling. Quantum mechanics is the most successful theory in the history of science. It predicts experimental results to astonishing precision. It helped build the transistor, the laser, and the chip in your phone. And the mathematics of that theory describes particles as existing in multiple possible states at once—in superposition—until a measurement or interaction yields a definite outcome.

For a hundred years, physicists have debated what exactly that outcome means. Does the wave function collapse? Does measurement play a special role? What are the implications?

Deutsch’s response is: stop avoiding the absurdity. Take the equations literally. If the mathematics says every possible outcome continues to evolve, then every possible outcome continues to evolve. The universe doesn’t pick just one branch. Reality branches. Every quantum event, every subatomic interaction with multiple possible outcomes, generates a vast branching structure—and each branch contains a version of events that is, under this interpretation, just as real as the one you experience.

The elegance of this theory is breathtaking. We need neither special rules for collapse nor a mysterious role for consciousness. In the many-worlds view, there is no collapse at all. Just the equations, evolving continuously in every direction at once.

The scale is also breathtaking. Somewhere in that branching structure, there may be a you who failed the test. A you who died at seven. A you doing something other than listening to me right now. Under this view, those possibilities are not erased. They persist in other branches—in parallel universes.

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The Rendered World

Now consider a very different picture of reality. On close inspection, the universe seems to come with limits: limits to resolution, limits to measurement, limits to what our current theories can describe. The Planck length—about a hundred-millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter—may mark the scale where our existing models of spacetime cease to work cleanly. Time appears to have a similar boundary. Energy comes in discrete packets. And some physicists suspect that information itself may be more fundamental than matter or energy.

For a certain kind of thinker, this begins to look suspiciously computational.

Discrete quantities. Resolution limits. A universe that, at extreme scales, behaves almost as if it were coded rather than continuous.

The simulation hypothesis takes that intuition and pushes it further. What if the reason physics keeps running into these apparent limits is that reality is, in some sense, computational? What if the universe resembles a rendered environment, the way a video game renders only the region your character currently occupies, leaving the rest compressed or ungenerated until needed? Or what if, as in procedurally generated games like No Man’s Sky, parts of the world are generated dynamically as you approach them?

From this perspective, quantum weirdness begins to look less mysterious. A particle may lack a definite position prior to measurement, not because consciousness creates reality, but because physical systems do not always settle into definite states until interactions occur. To simulation theorists, that can resemble a render trigger.

It’s a startlingly intuitive picture for a game designer. It offers a way of thinking about measurement, apparent fine-tuning of reality, and the deep mathematical structure of physics.

But it raises a question physics has historically tried to avoid asking: if reality is computational rendering, what is the computation running on?

The Dilemma

So here is the choice, stripped of jargon.

Behind Door Number One, we have an immense proliferation of realities, branching without end, almost all of them forever inaccessible to you. The cost is ontological extravagance on a scale the human mind can barely comprehend. But the payoff is that the equations evolve smoothly, without requiring a special collapse mechanism or a privileged observer.

Behind Door Number Two, we get a single apparent reality, but perhaps one emerging from some deeper informational or computational substrate we cannot access directly. The cost is that you must posit that deeper layer—and perhaps even a world beyond our own. Something, after all, would have to instantiate the computation. Yet the payoff is a potentially elegant way to think about the apparent fine-tuning and mathematical structure of THIS universe.

Each picture makes the other look absurd. The many-worlds advocate looks at the simulation hypothesis and says: “You’ve hidden another universe beyond the one you’re in, and smuggled in something suspiciously close to Descartes’s Demon or Berkeley’s Creator to explain it.” The simulation theorist looks at Many-Worlds and says: “You’ve replaced one universe with an unimaginable multiplicity, just to avoid admitting reality may be stranger at its foundation than we thought.”

And neither side is entirely wrong. That’s the absurdity. That’s the dilemma

Both, it turns out, attempt to answer real problems. Many-worlds attempts to resolve the measurement problem in quantum mechanics—the longest-standing interpretive puzzle in the field. The simulation hypothesis, meanwhile, offers one speculative way of thinking about fine-tuning: the curious fact that the constants of nature appear to fall within the narrow range that permits stars, chemistry, complexity, and minds to emerge.

Neither picture currently has decisive experimental confirmation. Maybe neither ever will. But neither is entirely empty either. Each horn of the dilemma represents a serious attempt to grapple with serious questions. And the discomfort they produce is not necessarily a sign that either is wrong. It may simply mean we’ve followed physics to a place our inherited intuitions can no longer comfortably follow.

So I leave you with questions I can’t shake: Which absurdity are you more willing to live with? The endless branching, or the rendered reality? Infinite worlds, or something like Descartes’s Demon?

Then there’s the harder question: What would actually count as evidence for either? What experiment, what observation, what crack in the facade would tell us which picture—if either—is closer to the truth?

Because right now, the honest answer is that we still don’t know. So here we sit, perched on the horns of a very strange dilemma.

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