The Prometheus Dispatch

Conjectures and Refutations - Karl Popper

Dr. Julie Gurner, *Ultra Successful* essays on imaginary rules, imposter labels, emotional resilience, and bending reality

The Slop Is You, Part Deux

Daniel Hatke — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:11:06 GMT

I did not edit what follows.

There is no human in the loop on the final passes of this essay.

Simply a passing “Human Generated” score at time of publishing.

Machines fighting machines, which, I suppose, is human.

The creation machine has evolved further than the detection avoidance machine. For now.

This will change and evolve. I am skeptical that this is the best pathway to an answer.

Everything was once written by guilds of scribes, and then there was Gutenberg.

I hope this is not coming across as defensive. That is not my posture. I simply believe people are trying to overlay the past on the future, and that is not how things go historically. This is how I try to understand our future.

Alex Lieberman did a real-time demo of his content machine on Claire Vo’s podcast. The setup was that AI reads his Slack and meetings to get a sense of what he cares about. Then the machine interviews him as if Howard Stern or Tim Ferriss were asking him questions. The AI drafts content in his cadence, and then a council of six editors scores drafts until they’re deemed good enough to clear a nine. The demo started, and three minutes later Lieberman’s AI issued a publishable post. Vo says at the end “we are actually the slop.” She’s right. That machine only produces slop when the input is weak. The model is average by default. It’s trained on the internet, so without a human idea to start it, it is beige. It can’t think. It can only reflect.

There are two opposed ways to point the tool. One offloads thinking to the page and produces slop; the other interrogates the user, pushes back and helps refine ideas, creating value. Sit with that, because we are about to spend enormous energy pretending the opposite.

Debating Slop

Substack turned on an AI detector. Chris Best announced it in a new essay called “Against Claudefishing.” Readers can scan over 100 words on any post to get a percentage of how much text AI wrote. Writers get a little box that shows how much AI was used. Best is right that this practice should be disclosed, but he also says we should “take the percentage as the single, overriding verdict on the quality or authenticity of a piece of writing.” I disagree.

Best coins the phrase “Claudefishing” for when there’s an “absence of human thought on the other end.” But it’s a rotten assumption to make about people. You can’t dismiss all machine-helped writing just because it doesn’t sound just like you. And for genuinely lazy content that puts no thought in, you earn the eye-roll. But the specific failure of some AI content hardens into a blanket dismissal.

The deeper, philosophical problem is the question of pedigree. Karl Popper once gave a lecture where he invited the audience to imagine a philosopher asking: How do we know what we know? The only possible answers would be that we know things through reason or we know things through the senses. Popper says this assumes that origin legitimizes knowledge, that it matters only where the truth came from. It’s a question that assumes authority. What Popper offered as a replacement was the question: How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?

Culture reaches for pedigree partly because it’s easier than looking closely at ideas. But it’s also from a guild reflex – authenticating, policing the border between real writers and machine-assisted pretenders, like a country club elevator operator insisting a human must manage the buttons. The fear is real, but the scanner works as a wall that keeps the field small; it discourages people from entering the arena, and weighs on those already in it.

But the field is not staying small. As AI collapses the distance between thought and expression, it is letting more people get their ideas on the page. Much of what they write is bad – they are people, after all – but some of it is interesting and worth reading.

Steven Johnson insists in *Where Good Ideas Come From* that good ideas are recombinations, borrowed and remixed from the ever-expanding adjacent possible. Not pure originality. As Matt Ridley wrote in *The Rational Optimist*, this joining up of ideas, this “ideas having sex,” is the engine of human progress. Every sentence you admire was assembled from borrowed pieces. The machine is the most efficient remixer the world has ever seen, and it still needs a human to tell it what is worth remixing.

I have long thought writing will eventually take the shape of the handbag industry – a huge degree of cheap, machine-made, good work in the bottom of the market, and a narrow premium at the top, where a Birkin still has to be hand-stitched over the course of several days by an artisan. The key difference is that in writing, the hand was never the point; the reader pays for the mind behind it – the sense of choice, intention, taste. A bored human can produce slop even with zero AI assistance, and a writer with a real idea can deploy AI heavily and still leave a mind on every line. The premium is what I’m talking about, and the premium sorts on the mind, not the tool.

I am all for it. The scanner is an inveterate Luddite hammer, but it is a hammer nonetheless, albeit a ham-fisted one, and the loom is already running; it pays for the loom by funding the arms race to beat it. Every serious detector calls its own defeat into being, and over time the market has – as it always should – split on the one thing a detector cannot measure. The essay you send a friend today comes almost exclusively from those with a mind worth the time, and many of them will be writing it with every machine available to mankind. The market has always paid for that, and I never needed a scanner.

Back to the reader holding the scanner. Glance at the number if you must, but if you let it decide, you surrender your own. I have been respectful of those making and selling detectors, but they can’t stand beside a writer like Emma Thompson or a poet like Selima Hill, both of whom can and have written excellent prose with no AI at all. They are ballast. If the idea was good, true, moving or useful, the number subtracts nothing. Your own senses are the instrument that detects the presence or absence of a mind.

The Slop Is You

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:58:02 GMT

The Slop Is You

Alex Lieberman is sharing his screen, and the podcast host has just dared him to prove his assertion.

He built a thing he calls a content machine: a stack of AI skills wired into his company's systems that reads his Slack and his meeting notes, surfaces the ideas worth writing about, interviews him in the voice of Tim Ferriss and Howard Stern to pull the specifics out of his head, drafts in his own cadence, then convenes a council of six imaginary editors who score the draft one to ten and send it back until it clears a nine. The host, Claire Vo, tells him his posts are genuinely good. Then she calls the bluff. "But prove it live."

So he does. He runs the machine on the podcast, in real time, and somewhere in the middle of watching an AI assemble a publishable post out of his own recorded answers, the host arrives at the joke that isn't a joke.

"So what you're saying is — we are actually the slop."

Yeah. That's exactly what he's saying.

Lieberman's line: the only time the machine produces slop is when the person feeding it didn't have anything good to say. The model is average by construction. It was trained on the entire internet, so its default gravity is the mid, the seen-before, the sentence you could have finished yourself. Left alone, it writes the beige. What it can't do is have the idea. The idea is yours. So is the taste that throws out three drafts, and the stubbornness to go check whether the thing is even true. Where the output is slop, a human was phoning it in. You can feel it.

Because there are two ways to point the tool, and they are opposed. One aims it at the page: write this for me so I don’t have to think it through. That is the setting that produces slop, reliably, whether the scanner says human or machine-generated. The other aims it at your own head: interrogate me, push back, hand me the question I was ducking, make me earn the line, what book should I read to know this better, who are the two most meaningful and opposed thinkers in history on this idea, there are so many ways to improve. Same machine, opposite result. One offloads the thinking; the other creates more value.

Sit with that, because we are about to spend enormous energy pretending the opposite.

Substack just turned on an AI detector.

Its CEO, Chris Best, announced it in a post titled "Against Claudefishing." The mechanics are simple: any reader can now scan a post longer than a hundred words and get an estimate of how much was written by hand versus by machine. Writers get a small box to disclose their process, a note that says, in effect, here is how I make this.

I want to be clear, because the easy move is to make certain writers, or Substack, the villain, depending on your priors. Substack is not the villain. Best is mostly right. He says it: they are not against people using AI to assist their work; people should simply know what they're getting. That is a disclosure argument, and I agree with it. There has been a note on my own About page for months telling you AI is part of how I make this. I am not hiding anything. Disclosure is honest.

It's the next step I want to fight: the part where a reader lets that number stand in for a verdict.

Look at Best's own coinage. Claudefishing, he says, is when there is a mismatch between what a reader expects and what they get: "something with no human thought on the other end." That phrase is the whole game. No human thought on the other end. It is the assumption underneath the entire anxiety: that if a machine helped assemble the words, then no mind was present, no thought occurred, and the reader is being catfished by an empty room.

For genuinely lazy content, the SEO sludge and the auto-blasted newsletter nobody read before it shipped, that's fair, and it earns the eye-roll it gets. Those same things have been human-generated for decades now, and we learned to judge their quality with our own minds. But watch how fast we let that specific failure metastasize. Watch "some AI content is thoughtless" harden into "AI content is thoughtless," and then into "this scanned high, so I can stop reading." Lieberman's machine has a human on the other end the entire time. So does mine. The percentage doesn't know that. The percentage can't know that. It is measuring the wrong thing.

What the detector actually asks

Sixty-five years ago Karl Popper gave a lecture on where knowledge comes from, and he refused the question. Asking "what is the ultimate source of this knowledge, reason or the senses?" was, he argued, an authoritarian question wearing an innocent face. It asks for a pedigree, the bloodline of an idea, so it can decide whether the idea is allowed to be true. And Popper's move (the one that belongs on the wall of every newsroom and English department this year) was to throw the question out and replace it with something smaller and harder: how can we hope to detect and eliminate error?

He was blunt about why the first question rots. "The question of the sources of our knowledge," he wrote, "like so many authoritarian questions, is a genetic one. It asks for the origin of our knowledge, in the belief that knowledge may legitimize itself by its pedigree."

Read that with a detector in your hand. "How much of this was written by AI?" is a pedigree question: it asks where the words came from, in the belief that origin settles worth. It is the same instinct as demanding to know a stranger's parents before you will trust him, and it fails for the same reason. Origin is not validity. Where a thing came from does not settle whether the idea in it is any good. The only question that ever separated good writing from bad is Popper's: is it true, is it useful, does it survive a skeptical reader, and when it's wrong, how fast do we catch it? A detector cannot ask that. It answers a different question, and it answers it beautifully.

And I mean beautifully. I am not telling you the detector is broken. Pangram, the tool Substack chose, is excellent: ninety-nine-point-something percent accurate, false positives near one in ten thousand. Grant it perfection. A flawless detector still only tells you how much a machine touched the words. It cannot tell you whether there was a mind on the other end, or whether that mind had anything worth your evening. A perfect instrument pointed at the wrong axis is still pointed at the wrong axis.

The wall that keeps the field small

So why does a culture reach for the pedigree instead of the idea? Partly because the idea is harder work. But something older is running underneath.

You can see it every time someone reaches for the scanner. The impulse to authenticate, to certify, to police the border between the real writers and the machine-assisted pretenders is the guild protecting the guild, the elevator operators insisting a car with nobody at the controls couldn't be trusted. And underneath the reflex is a real fear. It is disorienting, and more than disorienting, to spend years getting good at a craft and then watch a machine learn to do the passable version of it for free. I feel it too. But the scanner is the wrong answer to a real problem, because the wall you build to keep the machine out is the same wall that keeps the field small. You tell the newcomer his machine-helped work doesn't count, and he never posts the thing he had to say.

The field is not staying small. This is the part I am actually amped about. The tool is not going back in the bottle, and thank God, because of what it does when a real idea meets it: it collapses the distance between having the thought and getting it built. The person who always had something to say and never had the craft to assemble it or the reach to send it can now do both. That is not a threat to good work. That is more people in the arena, more ideas getting out, more of the exact thing a healthy culture is supposed to want. That is the whole damn point.

And if you're worried this means the end of originality, I have bad news that turns out to be good news. There was never any pure originality to protect.

Steven Johnson spent a book chasing where good ideas actually come from, and the answer is a lot grubbier than the lone genius pulling truth from the void. Good ideas are recombinations: old parts snapped into a new shape, borrowed, stolen, remixed out of whatever is lying around in what Johnson calls the adjacent possible, the pool of new combinations the pieces you already have suddenly make reachable. Matt Ridley named the engine of all human progress "ideas having sex," concepts meeting other concepts and throwing off offspring neither parent could have made alone. Every sentence you have ever admired was assembled from borrowed pieces by someone who read widely and stole well. The remix predates the machine by the whole length of human history. The machine is only the most efficient remixer we have ever built, and it still needs a human to tell it what is worth remixing.

The authentic, machine-untouched human original the detector wants to certify is a thing that never existed. What has always existed, what has always been the entire game, is the quality of the recombination. The taste. The judgment. The nerve to publish this and kill that.

Writing goes the way of the handbag

Here is the shape I actually expect, and it runs two directions at once. The abundance is one direction: cheap good work, everywhere, made by more hands than ever. The premium runs the other way, and a handbag shows you its shape. Every bag was once handmade, because there was no other way to make one. Then the machine came, and a bag became a twenty-dollar thing on every shoulder and a Cambrian explosion of variety, while the handmade one survived as the Birkin: stitched by a single artisan over days, priced past a car, bought by the very rich and no one else. Abundance at the bottom, a narrow premium at the top.

Writing is taking that shape, with one difference that is the whole point. For a bag, the hand is the value; nobody paying Birkin money cares whether the woman who stitched it ever had an interesting thought. For writing, the hand was never the point. The reader pays for the mind behind it: the sense that someone chose this, meant it, had something to say and the taste to say it well. And that sense has nothing to do with whether a machine helped type the words. A bored human can push out a thousand words with no mind behind them, score a perfect zero on the detector, all human, and it is still slop. A writer with a real idea can drive a machine hard, score a hundred, all AI, and leave a mind on every line. The premium sorts on the mind. The detector sorts on the tool.

So hold the two directions together and you can see what the scanner is: a Luddite with a hammer, and the loom is already running. And the hammer does worse than miss. It pays for the loom. The moment a platform the size of Substack makes a detector the gate, it posts a bounty on the tool built to walk past it. Wire in the scanner and you fund the other side of the arms race. Every detector that matters calls its own defeat into being, because the reward for beating it grows with how seriously the gate is taken. It saves no one, because the market is already splitting, and it splits on the one thing a detector cannot measure. The filler you scroll past will mostly be machine-made, because no one was ever going to pay for the hand that made it. The essay you send a friend will come from the shrinking number of people who have a mind worth the time, and some of them will have used every machine they could reach to make it. A scanner can tell you a human was present. It cannot tell you a mind was. The market has always paid for the second thing, without mercy, and it never once needed a scanner to find it.

Which brings it back to you, holding the scanner, deciding whether to read.

Here is what I want to say to the reader who runs the number before running their eyes. Glance at it if you want; it is a signal like a byline, and no signal was ever a verdict. But let a percentage decide whether a real idea is worth your eyes, and you have surrendered the one judgment that was always yours. Your inability to tell whether a machine helped is not a fact about the writer. It is a fact about you: about a judgment you would rather hand to a percentage than perform yourself. If the idea was good, if the claim was true, if it moved you or taught you or changed the shape of an hour, what exactly does the number subtract? You already know how to do this. You have senses. You can feel the difference between a sentence someone meant and a sentence assembled to fill space, and you can feel it faster than any classifier, because what you are detecting is the presence or absence of a mind. That is the instrument. Use it. Stop asking a machine to tell you whether you were moved, educated, informed, or entertained.

The whole time Lieberman ran his machine, there was a human on the other end. Someone choosing the idea, feeding the specifics, throwing out the drafts that rang false, deciding this was worth your attention. "No human thought on the other end" was only ever true of the slop, and the slop, as the man said, is us. It always was. The laziness was ours long before the tool arrived; the tool only made it easier to see.

So turn your brain on. The future showed up a little early, and it is asking you the oldest question there is, and it has nothing to do with AI: is this any good?

Tomorrow’s essay will be this same one. Written by a machine, and the machine detector will show 100% human generated.

This is silly incentive design. Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome.

You tell me which essay is better.

Sources and Inspiration

Where Good Ideas Come From - Steven Johnson

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life - Walter Isaacson

Two Leather Buckets, Marked B. Franklin & Co

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:50:05 GMT

In 1743, a small notice ran in the Pennsylvania Gazette: "Lost at the late fire on Water Street, two leather buckets, marked B. Franklin & Co. Whoever brings them to the printer hereof shall be satisfied for their trouble."

The man who placed it was the most successful printer in colonial America. He published the paper the notice ran in. He wrote the almanac the colonies quoted at each other. Within a decade he would be the most famous scientist alive. And he spent part of his week hauling leather buckets to house fires, and when he lost two of them, he wanted them back.

He had buckets because he belonged to a fire company. There was a fire company because, seven years earlier, no such thing existed in Philadelphia, and he decided that was a problem he could fix.

Picture the city he walked into. Philadelphia in 1727 had no library. No fire department. No hospital, no college, no functioning night watch. Fires took whole blocks. Books belonged to gentlemen who could afford to import them. The watch consisted of constables who dunned their neighbors a fee, hired whoever showed up, and drank through the night.

Benjamin Franklin was twenty-one years old, a printer's tradesman with two years of formal schooling. That fall he gathered eleven other young workingmen (a glassworker, a scrivener, a couple of clerks, a surveyor) into a Friday evening club they called the Junto. Initiates stood, laid a hand on their breast, and answered four questions. The last one: Do you love and pursue truth for its own sake?

The club had rules that tell you everything about the man who wrote them. Discussions were to be conducted "without fondness for dispute or desire of victory." Expressing too much certainty was punished. "All expressions of positiveness in opinion or of direct contradiction were prohibited under small pecuniary penalties." Twelve tradesmen in leather aprons, fining each other for being too sure of themselves.

Then watch what comes out of those Friday evenings over the next twenty years.

The members pooled their books on a common shelf. The shelf worked, so Franklin scaled it: recruit subscribers, charge dues, import books from London. The Library Company of Philadelphia incorporated in 1731, fifty subscribers, "mostly young tradesmen." It is the oldest cultural institution in the United States. It is still operating.

Fires kept eating the city, so Franklin wrote a letter to his own newspaper under a pseudonym, posing as an old man with opinions about prevention, and proposed organized fire-fighting clubs with specific duties. The piece was "much spoken of," so he organized the Union Fire Company in 1736. So many people wanted in that it spawned sister companies across town.

The night watch was a racket, so he drafted a proposal to fund full-time watchmen through a property tax scaled to the value of each home, reasoning it was unfair that "a poor widow housekeeper" whose guarded property "did not perhaps exceed the value of fifty pounds, paid as much as the wealthiest merchant." That one needed the Assembly's signoff and took until 1752 to pass; the watch was a government function, and he knew which problems were. The rest he simply built.

The pattern repeated until the city was unrecognizable. The academy he proposed became the University of Pennsylvania. The hospital came the same way. Most of it required no ministry, no ideology, and no one's permission.

The library fundraising taught him a trick he kept for the rest of his life. Franklin discovered that people resented a "proposer of any useful project that might be supposed to raise one's reputation." So he put himself "as much as I could out of sight," credited the idea to friends, and watched the subscriptions come in. "The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid." Abigail Adams ran the same calculation from a farm in Braintree: the work lands better when you stop demanding to be seen with it. Franklin systematized it. Visibility was a cost he paid down so the project could clear.

A problem, a proposal, a subscription list. Run the loop again.

The stove he gave away

In the early 1740s, Franklin applied his knowledge of convection to a problem every colonist lived with: fireplaces that sent the heat up the chimney and the smoke into the room. He designed a stove that promised more warmth from less wood, had a Junto friend manufacture it, and wrote the promotional pamphlet himself. Testimonials filled the papers. One letter writer declared the inventor "merits a statue."

The governor of Pennsylvania offered him a patent. Exclusive rights to a heating device, in a cold country, in a wood-scarce century. "But I declined it," Franklin wrote. "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."

Here is the part the statue version leaves out: the stove mostly didn't work. Unless the channels were already hot, the smoke backed into the room. Sales tapered off. Manufacturing stopped within two decades, and most owners gutted the clever convection chamber out of the design. Franklin spent the rest of his life revising his theories of chimneys and drafts, the way you do when results come back and you let them count.

That failure is what makes the refusal interesting. He turned down the patent around 1744, barely four years before he could afford to retire, on a device whose commercial future he had every reason to believe in. The money was real to him and he declined it anyway, because he held a theory about where inventions belong: in circulation, compounding, available to the next tinkerer. He kept that policy his whole life. The lightning rod went to the world the same way, unpatented, along with everything else he invented.

He created more than he captured, and the remainder is what we walk around in.

When he did retire, at forty-two, exactly the midpoint of his life, it was so he could give more of it away. "Leisure to read, study, make experiments, and converse at large with such ingenious and worthy men as are pleased to honor me with their friendship." He had said it plainly years before, reporting an experiment: "What signifies philosophy that does not apply to some use?" He didn't entirely live by that, for the record. As clerk of the Assembly he passed dull sessions constructing magic squares of numbers, and cheerfully admitted they were "incapable of useful application." Even his utility kept a hobby.

Conviction without certainty

Jefferson had a philosophy. Adams had a temperament. Hamilton had a system. Franklin had a method: try the thing, measure the result, adjust. He held his convictions the way a scientist holds hypotheses, firmly enough to act on, loosely enough to revise. The Junto's fines against "positiveness" were the method applied to conversation. The stove revisions were the method applied to failure. The subscription library was the method applied to a city.

Two centuries later, Eric Hoffer would anatomize the opposite character: the true believer, who joins the cause to escape the burden of his own unfinished self, and for whom the doctrine grows more precious as the evidence runs against it. Hoffer's fanatic needs the certainty more than the outcome. Franklin is the cleanest counterexample the American record offers. He had convictions and causes in abundance; what he refused was the certainty. At eighty-one, the oldest man at a Convention that nearly failed, his great contribution was a speech asking every delegate to "doubt a little of his own infallibility" and sign anyway. Walter Isaacson, his biographer, rendered the verdict in one line: "Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make democracies."

The hardest proof of that temperament is the one least comfortable to tell. Franklin held slaves in his household and ran ads for slave sales in his paper, as his world did and mostly did without a second thought. A true believer holds the inherited conviction to the grave. Franklin, who held nothing as settled, eventually held this up to the light too. Late, he changed his mind, and then did what almost none of his peers did: he acted on it. President of Pennsylvania's abolition society at eighty-four. A petition to Congress that mankind was "all formed by the same Almighty Being," owed liberty "without distinction of color." And three weeks before he died, one last satire, an Algerian official defending the enslavement of Christians with every argument Congress had just used for the enslavement of Africans, the Junto printer's whole toolkit aimed at last where it should have aimed sooner. He got there late. Most never got there at all.

And when Alexis de Tocqueville toured America a century after the Junto's first Friday meeting, he found Americans "of all ages, all conditions, all minds" joined in associations "to raise churches, to distribute books," associations that "create hospitals, prisons, schools." It reads like an inventory of Franklin's Philadelphia. He was describing habits one printer had spent the 1730s teaching a city, the disposition that asks what can I do before it asks what tradition or ministry permits. Tocqueville found the township functioning as democracy's schoolhouse. Franklin had built the curriculum: the library, the fire company, the watch, each one a small rehearsal for self-governance, each one proof that the people who name the problem can be the people who fix it.

I want to be careful here, because I find this man easy to admire and his method easy to flatter myself with. I keep a running ledger of things that are broken around me: the compliance thicket that taxes my business before the tax itself, the institutions that don't work the way the label says. I can recite my ledger fluently. Franklin kept the same ledger. The difference is that every entry on his became a proposal with a subscription list attached, and most entries on mine are still grievances I'm nursing because the grievance is cheaper. The pie grows the way Philadelphia grew: somebody stops auditing the smallness of their slice and builds the next oven.

In 1785, a Massachusetts town named itself Franklin and wrote to ask the great man for a church bell. He sent crates of books instead, suggesting "sense being preferable to sound," and told them to build a library.

Around the same time, back from Paris, he gathered what remained of the Union Fire Company. He was the only person who signed all four founding documents: the Declaration, the treaty with France, the peace with Britain, the Constitution. Kings had received him. Four members of the original company were still alive, so the five of them met, as before, with their leather buckets.

He had measured his life in many currencies by then, and this was one he still counted. A republic, he told a woman outside the Convention, if you can keep it. The keeping has always looked less like the signing table and more like the bucket line: a few neighbors, organized on purpose, showing up for a city that would burn a little less because they did. There is always a next fire. The buckets still have our names on them.

Sources and Inspiration

The True Believer - Eric Hoffer

The Road to Serfdom - F.A. Hayek

The Cure Is a Boom

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:50:12 GMT

A family in my zip code needs to earn more than $186,000 a year to afford the median home. I ran the math twice because I didn't believe it the first time. Two working persons, both doing what the old script promised would be enough, looking at a house that used to signify an ordinary middle-class life. If they happen to be parents of pre-K-aged kids, one parent needs to earn all of that $186k, or the number will have to go up significantly due to exorbitant daycare costs.

That is the ground we are standing on. Groceries a third more than they cost a few years ago. Rent that swallows the raise before it lands. A war with Iran this spring that sent fuel prices surging and pushed inflation to a three-year high. A jobs report that came in at barely half of what forecasters expected. If the country feels like it is fraying, you are not imagining it, and I am not going to insult you by pretending the numbers are gentle. They are not.

Here is where I break with the vast majority.

Everyone is watching the wrong remake

The story going around is that this is the 1970s again. An oil shock out of the Middle East. Inflation that will not sit still. Not long ago the market cast Jerome Powell as ineffectual or hiding from the inflation store, calling it transitory. Then he called his inner Paul Volcker and belatedly oversaw the steepest climb in the Fed Funds rate in four decades. The yield curve inverted, the textbook promised a recession, and we all waited for the crash the rule said had to come. Then Powell handed off, and this spring Kevin Warsh took the chair, talking tough about a fresh inflation as "a burden for the American people." The market braced for the hammer to fall again.

The crash never came. The rule broke. And I think the forecasters have the right decade, the wrong ending, and the wrong read on the new man in the chair.

Start with what kind of inflation this actually is. The first wave, back in 2021, really was too much money: trillions in stimulus stacked on near-zero rates and an expanding Federal Reserve balance sheet, demand ran hot, and prices took off the way the old rule says they should. Then rates rose, demand cooled, and the worst of it came back down. What the hiking could not reach is what it left behind. Not enough houses. Not enough power. Not enough of what a growing country is trying to buy. A shortage like that is not a money problem, and it does not answer to the price of money.

You cannot raise interest rates and expect more homes.

Push rates high enough and you strangle the very supply you were trying to summon. The builder who would have broken ground can no longer finance the lot. The developer who would have added a hundred units pencils out to zero. Raise the cost of money into a housing shortage and you get fewer houses, which keeps the shortage, which keeps the prices exactly where the hiking was supposed to bring them down. Those with lower mortgage rates feel stuck or validated. Either way, they aren't moving and that further increases the stalemate of higher rates. The rate is a hammer, and the problem was never a nail.

Friedrich Hayek spent his career on one stubborn idea: the knowledge an economy runs on is scattered across millions of people and never gathers in one place, least of all in the head of whoever is trying to steer it. The planner cannot see the shortage well enough to fix it by decree. Neither, it turns out, can the central banker, working the one blunt lever he owns.

Warsh knows this, which is why the market is misreading its new central banker. It watched Powell break the last inflation with brute force, and it assumes Warsh will meet this one the same way. It has cast him as the next hawk. He does talk tough, and he means it, but the toughness has an address: the Fed's balance sheet, the multi-trillion-dollar hoard of bonds the central bank has been sitting on since the last crisis. That is the lever almost no one outside the banks and the Fed watches. On the lever everyone does watch, the interest rate, he is patient, and he keeps mentioning productivity. That is the tell. Jacking rates into a supply crunch is the one move a man who understands this economy would refuse, and Warsh understands it. When a reporter pressed him on whether he would hike at the next meeting, he did not perform certainty. He asked for "a good family fight" behind closed doors, a real debate, nothing more. The man everyone is parsing word by word is telling you he does not yet know his own answer. He is the dog who caught the car. Or he is something better than that: a man who will have the scrappy fight over strategy behind that closed door, then walk out and lock arms with the rest of the committee. That is deliberation in the old sense, the real argument in private that we have been trained to mistake for weakness.

I could be wrong about the man. He spent years as a hard-money hawk, and a hawk who means it hikes. So let me put a number on the bet: if Warsh drives the funds rate meaningfully higher through 2027 rather than holding it, I have misread him, and the recession the curve promised was only late. I don't think he will. But that is the hinge, and I would rather name it than hide it.

Define your bubble

Nobody can call this regime from the outside, because the variable that decides it is one the 1970s did not have. Artificial intelligence, and the buildout underneath it.

Say "AI boom" in a serious room and someone will say "bubble," and point to the year 2000, when telecom companies laid enough fiber-optic cable to circle the earth many times over, went bankrupt doing it, and left most of it sitting dark in the ground. It is a fair warning. It is also, I think, a misread, and the misread comes from never defining the word.

A bubble is building for demand that is not there. In 2000 they laid the cable ahead of the traffic, and the traffic took a decade to show up. That is a demand bubble, and it is the dangerous kind. What we have in 2026 is the reverse: we cannot build the thing fast enough for the demand we already have. The data centers are leased before the concrete cures. The chips are rationed. The companies buying compute are standing in line for capacity they need this quarter.

Now, is the money getting ahead of the revenue? Absolutely. The capital pouring into this is running further ahead of what it earns than telecom's did at its peak, and some of that financing is starting to eat its own tail, one company investing in the next so that the next can buy its chips. Even Sam Altman, who has more reason than anyone alive to talk his book, says out loud that someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money, that when bubbles happen smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth. He is right. There is froth, and some of it will burst.

But froth on top of real demand is a different animal from a mirage. The financing can bubble; the need underneath it is not a bubble. Keep those two apart and the whole picture changes.

The froth can burst. What it is built on is not froth.

Because here is what a bust actually leaves behind. When the telecom bubble popped, the cable did not evaporate. It sat there, cheap, and became the backbone the entire modern internet was later built on top of. Every video you have ever streamed rode rails a bankrupt company laid in a mania. A bust wipes out the people who paid too much to build the thing and hands the next generation the infrastructure at a discount. The thing itself stays.

For AI, the durable residue is the power, the grid, the land, the buildings, and, cascading down the stack as newer chips arrive, a fleet of older processors that keep right on working. I will bet against the idea that these chips are dead in two or three years. The frontier models want the newest silicon, yes. But the older chips do not go to a landfill; they slide down to run the smaller, faster, cheaper models that are multiplying underneath the frontier, and they run them for years, and they run them longest wherever power is cheap, or in my basement after the price collapses.

America owns the track

Which is the one place I will let a pessimist land a real punch. Vaclav Smil, who has spent a lifetime insisting that the physical world does not move at the speed of software, would tell you that all of this runs on energy and steel and grid, and that those things change over decades, not quarters. He is right, and it is the genuine constraint on how fast any of this can happen.

It is also where America has a real edge, and the edge is abundance. When the war with Iran sent energy markets into convulsions this spring and the Strait of Hormuz became the most dangerous stretch of water on earth, our gasoline jumped, because oil is priced on a single global market and always will be. But the natural gas and the electricity that actually run a data center barely moved, while gas prices doubled across Asia and Europe. We built that capacity, and it is why the buildout can happen here at all. The compute race is a power race, and our abundance is the track we can lay for the whole world to run on.

Power is the one input we are not short of, and the whole world runs on it.

So put it together. A supply crunch you cannot fix by hiking. A Fed chair who quietly knows it and is betting on productivity. A demand-real buildout that even its bust would leave as usable track. And a country that produces the power the whole thing runs on. What you are looking at is a launchpad, if we can keep from setting it on fire.

The reckoning we are already in

I want to be honest about the "if," because there is a version of this that ends badly, and the person who taught me to take it seriously is Neil Howe. His theory is that history moves in long seasons, that every few generations a society hits a winter, a crisis that tears down the old order before a new one can grow. He would look at the war, the inflation, the fury in our politics, and say we are deep in that winter now. And he would add a warning I cannot wave away: the debt is so large this time that the usual cushion, the government spending its way through the pain, may not be there when we reach for it.

Here is my divergence, and I will own it as a bet against the narrative. Every prior American winter climaxed in total war: the Revolution, the Civil War, the Second World War. The war was never only the pain. It was the reset: it forced unity, rebuilt the institutions, cleared the old debts. Nuclear weapons may have quietly closed that door, because the great powers cannot fight the war that used to reset the board without ending the board. So the pressure goes somewhere else. It turns inward, into an economic shakeout and a fight over who we are.

That is not the same as gentle. Take away the external war and you may take away the reset while keeping the pain. The bloodiest winter this country ever had was the one it fought against itself, and a debt crisis with no cushion is a cold reckoning that can still cost everything. My bet is narrow: that this one resolves through markets and argument rather than on a battlefield. It costs us something either way.

And the shakeout may be the AI bust itself. The reckoning runs through the buildout, not around it. What the fire burns away is the froth, the overpriced money, the companies that mistook a mania for a moat. What it leaves standing is the track. And America owns the track.

The fever is downstream of the scarcity

None of this is really about your portfolio. It matters because our politics is sicker than it has been in my lifetime, and I have come to believe the sickness is downstream of the economics. When the pie stops growing, people stop building and start fighting over the slices. Scarcity is what turns a country zero-sum.

Byrne Hobart, who reads markets with a historian's eye, made the case in Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation: the real enemy is stagnation, and a bubble, for all the money it torches, is how a free society coordinates its capital and its talent around a frontier worth crossing. Take away that frontier and the country turns inward and small, squabbling over what is already on the table. A boom does more than move markets; it gives a people something to build toward instead of something to take from one another.

What is truly scarce are not natural resources or new ideas but the human will and courage to unlock nature's intrinsic superabundance. There are no limits to growth, only the growth of limits.

Stop growing the pie, and all that is left is the fight over the slices.

You can see the fever on both flanks, and it is the same fever wearing two costumes. On one side, the impulse to freeze the rents and tax the builders, to redistribute a pile the movement has quietly decided is fixed. On the other, the impulse to wall the country off, to slam the door on the immigrant engineer and the foreign trade that the buildout actually runs on, to retreat into a smaller and more nostalgic past. Left and right, the shared premise is that the pile is fixed and the only question is who gets which slice.

Both are wrong for the same reason, and here is the inversion that ties this whole essay together. The thing most likely to cause the crash is not overbuilding. It is being stopped from building. Block the power plant, block the data center, turn away the engineer, freeze the price, and costs climb geometrically until the demand everyone was counting on finally breaks. The fixed-pie politics does more than slow the boom; it is the mechanism that could manufacture the bust and bloodshed. Clearing the way to build is the thing that keeps the whole structure standing.

When the extremes on both flanks harden, the temptation is to want them gone: silenced, banned, driven out of public life. I feel it too. And it is the wrong instinct, because it is the very move we are objecting to. James Madison built a republic to metabolize faction, a machine designed to beat bad ideas in the open rather than remove them by force. You defeat this the way a free country always has, by winning the argument in daylight, and by letting the recovery drain the fever that feeds the extremes in the first place. A country that is building again is a country with less to fight over.

Which brings me back to the family that cannot afford the house. A boom that shows up in the GDP figures and the stock index but never reaches that kitchen table is not a boom anyone living it will believe in. The recovery only counts when the house is buildable again, because we finally let it be built. That is the whole wager, and I am making it against the grain: we took the shock, we are living through the reckoning, and waiting on the other side is a country that builds like it means it. The pessimists are not wrong about the winter. They are wrong about the spring. The only thing that can rob us of it is the smallness that would stop us from building our way out, and that, at least, is still ours to refuse.

Sources and Inspiration

How the World Really Works - Vaclav Smil

The Fourth Turning Is Here - Neil Howe

The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation - Byrne Hobart

Selection Bias on the 250th

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:06:59 GMT

America, Our Dare — a series on the American experiment, for the 250th

Founding Fragility · A Government Designed to Be Wrong · We Keep Building · Selection Bias on the 250th

The church in Voltlage is small. Stone walls, wooden pews, a ceiling that has watched centuries of prayer without comment. I stood in it several years ago, trying to feel what my ancestors felt the last time they were here. Before they left for America.

Outside, my cousins showed me Ibbenbüren and Voltlage. Their area, their lives, the local inn. These are the lives my family would have lived. Good lives. Steady. The kind where you know the bakery by the owner’s first name and the cemetery holds five generations of your blood.

Someone in my family looked at all of that and decided to leave.

I don’t know what they told themselves on the walk out of town. I know they prayed in this church, and then they started walking toward something they couldn’t see, across an ocean they might not survive, into a country that was still figuring itself out.

That’s the founding act.

Not of the Republic. That came earlier, with documents and arguments and a war that should have been lost half a dozen times. I mean the act the Republic was designed to make repeatable: choosing this country under conditions of uncertainty, with no guarantee the country you bet on survives.

The framers did it at one scale, signing themselves over to a system that didn’t yet exist while the most powerful empire on earth committed itself to crushing them. Frederick Douglass did it at a stranger scale. Standing in Rochester in 1852, having every reason to repudiate the document, he praised it instead. He called it a glorious liberty document. He claimed a country that had not claimed him. His ancestors had been brought across the Atlantic against their will. He chose the experiment for them too.

My ancestor in Voltlage did it at a third scale.

So did yours. Maybe it was you, walking off a plane with one suitcase. Maybe it was a grandparent, a great-great-grandmother, a refugee, a dreamer, a desperate person with nothing left to lose. Maybe it was someone seven generations back who arrived by boat under terms no person should ever have faced. Or maybe it was an ancestor who was on this land long before the Republic arrived, and whose descendants have had to make the choice to claim a country that arrived on top of theirs. The choosing the country runs on is broader than immigration. It is the act of claiming the experiment as one’s own, and the people who had to claim it the hardest carry it the heaviest.

This is what makes America different. France is France because the French were mostly born there. Japan is Japan because the Japanese share millennia of continuity on the same islands. America is America because people kept choosing it. They keep choosing it. The country is not a fixed inheritance. It is a continuous act of selection.

And that selection is not an act of comfort. Nobody leaves what they know for what they don’t because it’s easy. The calculation doesn’t work if you’re optimizing for safety. Something deeper is operating.

The spirited part

The Greeks understood the soul as three things working together. Reason calculates. Appetite wants: comfort, security, pleasure, more. And between them, something harder to name: thumos. Spirit. The part that drives you toward risk and honor and purpose, even when reason says the odds are bad and appetite says stay home. Thumos is what makes a person stand up when sitting down would be easier. It’s the part of you that would rather try and fail than succeed at something that doesn’t matter.

The people who got on boats had thumos. Appetite stays where the bread is. Reason would have counted the odds of surviving the crossing and recommended staying put. Spirit. The willingness to risk everything for the chance at something you can’t yet prove exists.

Plato thought this part of us came first. We may observe even in young children that they are full of spirit almost as soon as they are born, whereas some of them never seem to attain to the use of reason, and most of them late enough. The spirited part is in us before we know what we are.

The Declaration of Independence is a thumos document. Read the closing line: We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Lives. Fortunes. Honor. That’s fifty-six men telling the most powerful empire on earth that they would rather die free than live managed. Appetite would have negotiated. Reason might have waited for better odds. Spirit signed.

The founding was fragile. What survived it was fragile. But the spirit that created it was not cautious, and it was not calculated. It was chosen.

I’ve felt this spirit in small rooms where the arguments got loud because the stakes were real, and the friction was the feature, not the failure.

That’s esprit de corps. Shared direction with permission to fight about how to get there. You argue about strategy. Then you suit up together.

This was the township esprit de corps the series has been circling: citizens governing their shared life directly, arguing about it, building things together because the work needed doing. The friction was the feature. A country of people who chose to be here, choosing again every morning to build something with the people next to them, even when they couldn’t agree on what exactly it should look like.

That was the esprit de corps. Sturdier than patriotism, which can be performed. Warmer than nationalism, which excludes. The felt sense of being on the same team. Wanting the people next to you to succeed because their success is yours, because you chose the same experiment and your name is on it.

What negation sounds like

I talk to people on the left. I hear guilt. I hear that we’re undeserving, that the people in power have made everything bad, that America’s sins outweigh its contributions. I hear a kind of preemptive surrender: the country isn’t worth defending because the country isn’t worth admiring.

I talk to people on the right. I hear corruption, swamp, decay. I hear that everything is broken, that the institutions are captured, that the only option is to tear it down and basically start over. Frustration so deep it has become its own identity.

Neither is a vision. What I hear from both sides is negation. What’s wrong, what’s broken, what we’re against. If you only define yourself by what you reject, you get exactly what you feared. A nation of people listing what’s wrong, with no shared sense of what they’re building toward.

I believe in American exceptionalism. I say that knowing how it sounds, knowing it makes some people flinch and other people reflexively salute. Both reactions miss the point. The exceptionalism I mean is structural: this is the only country on earth constituted by choosing. Every other nation is an inheritance of geography or blood. This one is a bet. A continuous, renewable, voluntarily undertaken bet that people who disagree about nearly everything can govern themselves together if they have enough spirit to keep showing up.

When that spirit gets replaced by negation, the adversaries notice. The information warfare, the discord operations, the algorithmic amplification of division: these work because we’ve made ourselves easy to fracture. A team that knows what it’s playing for can absorb disagreement. A team that’s forgotten will tear itself apart.

Thumos has enemies, and they’re not foreign. The deeper threat is exhaustion. Freedom is a burden. It always has been. Choosing is hard, and choosing every day is harder, and at some point the appeal of not choosing, of handing it over, of just being angry and calling that a position, becomes overwhelming. I feel it myself. I watch myself drift toward the comfortable negation, the satisfying grievance, the thing that feels like a stance but is really just fatigue in a costume.

The 250th isn’t a celebration of perfection. This country has never been perfect. It was built by flawed people who owned human beings and excluded most of the population from the rights they proclaimed. The work they left is unfinished, and it will always be unfinished, because that’s how self-governance works. You don’t finish it. You keep choosing it.

But here is what I want to say on this, the 250th birthday.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of people with no guarantee of success pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to an idea that had never been tried at this scale. They chose it. And since then, millions of people from every corner of the earth have looked at their own church in their own Voltlage and decided to leave. They chose it too. They chose the risk, the uncertainty, the bet that a country built on choosing would be worth the cost of choosing it.

That choosing hasn’t stopped. People are still coming. People are still here. The question at 250 is whether we’re still the kind of people who would choose it. Who would get on the boat. Who would sign the document. Who would pray in the church and then walk toward something they couldn’t see.

I think we are. I think we’re better than the negation. I think the spirit that drove our ancestors to leave everything they knew is still in us, buried under grievance and exhaustion and the noise of people telling us what’s wrong with everything. It’s still there. It’s the part that gets angry because things could be better and we know it.

So here’s the toast.

To the choosers. To everyone whose ancestor left a village, a country, a continent, and selected themselves into the most improbable experiment in human history. To the ones fleeing real persecution. To the ones who want personal freedoms, who want to build, who want to change, try, experiment and make better. To the ones who are still choosing. To the ones who argue and then suit up together and lock arms. To the spirited part.

Happy 250th. The experiment isn’t over. It’s ours.

America, Our Dare — a series on the American experiment, for the 250th

Founding Fragility · A Government Designed to Be Wrong · We Keep Building · Selection Bias on the 250th

Sources and Inspiration

The Republic - Plato

We Keep Building

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 16:12:56 GMT

America, Our Dare — a series on the American experiment, for the 250th

Founding Fragility · A Government Designed to Be Wrong · We Keep Building · Selection Bias on the 250th

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before a crowd in Rochester, New York, and asked the question everyone in the room already knew the answer to. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” He called the celebration a sham. He called the nation’s piety revolting. He called the gap between the Declaration’s language and the nation’s practice wider than the gap between heaven and hell.

Then he did something that most people forget.

He praised the Constitution. He called it “a glorious liberty document.” He argued that its principles and purposes, properly interpreted, were entirely hostile to slavery. The framework, Douglass insisted, was sound. The failure was in the application. And the remedy was not to abandon the document but to hold the nation accountable to it.

A formerly enslaved man, standing in a country that still enslaved millions of people who looked like him, examined the republic’s founding text and concluded that the text was worth fighting for. That it was better than the people who wrote it. That a sentence like “all men are created equal,” penned by a slaveholder, contained a promise that could be redeemed by people the author had never imagined as its beneficiaries.

That sentence has been doing work for 250 years.

The framework and its failures

“All men are created equal” was not true when Thomas Jefferson wrote it. He knew it. Many of his contemporaries knew it. The nation that ratified those words permitted slavery, excluded women from public life, and restricted the franchise to propertied white men. The founding was fragile in every sense: militarily, politically, and morally.

Here is what happened anyway. Citizens in every subsequent generation took the sentence literally and demanded the nation live up to it. Douglass did it from the lectern. The suffragists did it from jail cells, enduring force-feeding during hunger strikes. The civil rights workers in Birmingham did it by marching into fire hoses, on national television, while a city’s police force demonstrated exactly what the framework was supposed to prevent.

None of them waited for the system to fix itself. They used the system’s own stated principles as leverage against its practiced failures. And this is the part that gets lost in both the celebratory and the critical tellings of the American story: the system working IS what correcting its flaws looks like. The corrections were never automatic. They were extracted, over decades, by people who paid real costs.

Hannah Arendt’s word for this was natality. Each generation enters the world capable of beginning something the world has never seen. The framework doesn’t correct itself. People correct it, and each generation’s corrections become the next generation’s starting point. The suffragists didn’t discover a hidden clause in the Nineteenth Amendment that had been there all along. They created something new within an existing structure by insisting the structure meant what it said.

Popper saw the same mechanism from the other side. The open society isn’t redesigned from a blueprint. It is repaired piecemeal: find what’s broken, fix it, test the fix, adjust. The American experiment, at its best, has been exactly this. Citizens noticed the gap between the promise and the practice and refused to let the gap stand.

But I don’t want to make this sound like progress moving in one direction. It hasn’t. The Trail of Tears happened within two generations of the founding. Japanese internment happened within 74 years of the Fourteenth Amendment. The system’s self-correcting capacity has failed, repeatedly, catastrophically. Real people have absorbed the cost of those failures with their lives, their families, their futures.

A framework that permits such failures still deserves the investment of citizens who could be doing something else with their energy and their hope. And I think the honest answer is: only if the framework also contains the mechanisms for repair. Only if the people working within it can point to the framework’s own principles and say, “You wrote this. Now live up to it.”

Douglass could do that. The suffragists could do that. The marchers in Birmingham could do that. They could make the argument from within, using the nation’s stated commitments against its practiced evasions. A system without those commitments offers nothing to reform. A system with them offers a handhold.

Citizens built the handholds

Tocqueville’s townships were not just where Americans practiced democracy. They were where citizens learned to organize themselves around problems no king or ministry would ever solve for them. Voluntary associations: school boards, fire companies, reading circles, barn raisings. Ordinary people forming themselves into the institutions that filled the gaps the framework left.

That proximity created something. I don’t have a precise name for it. Civic fabric, maybe, or just the texture of a life lived in unavoidable contact with other people. Whatever it was, it functioned as the republic’s immune system. When the framework failed at the national level (and it failed constantly), the capacity for self-correction lived in the civic habits of ordinary citizens who couldn’t avoid one another even if they wanted to. The abolitionist societies that Douglass addressed were voluntary associations. The suffragist organizations that sustained a seventy-year campaign were voluntary associations. The churches and community organizations that planned the Montgomery Bus Boycott were voluntary associations. The correction came from below, from citizens who practiced the habits of collective action in their daily lives and deployed those habits when the national failure became unbearable.

Erich Fromm gave the underlying capacity a name. He distinguished between negative freedom (freedom from constraint) and positive freedom (freedom to build, to create, to realize one’s capacity through meaningful work). The citizen-builders in every generation exercised positive freedom. They didn’t just resist tyranny. They constructed something: an organization, a legal argument, a movement, a new interpretation of an old promise. Fromm saw this as the healthy response to freedom’s burden, the alternative to the escape mechanisms that pull people toward submission or conformity. Positive freedom requires what Fromm called “spontaneous activity”: not waiting for instructions, not following someone else’s blueprint, but building from your own conviction in concert with others.

Rollo May put it more simply. Freedom doesn’t come automatically. It must be achieved each day. The citizen who showed up to the abolitionist meeting on a Tuesday evening, who marched on a Wednesday morning, who testified before a committee on a Thursday afternoon, was conquering freedom daily. And May named the reward: joy. The quiet satisfaction of using your powers for something worth the effort.

This is what May meant: Joy is the affect which comes when we use our powers. Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.

The people who built the handholds weren’t grim. They sang on the marches. They laughed at their own impossible odds. Joy accompanied the work because the work was the exercise of freedom, and freedom exercised produces something better than happiness.

Stress, not collapse

America has looked like it was unraveling many times. The Civil War nearly destroyed the union altogether. The Depression shattered confidence in the economic order. The civil rights crisis exposed a moral chasm that the nation had papered over for a century. Vietnam divided the country into factions that could barely speak to each other.

Each time, the stress produced a stronger version. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments emerged from the Civil War. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act emerged from Birmingham and Selma. These were not gifts from a benevolent system correcting itself. They were extracted by citizens who stayed in the arena when every reasonable calculation said the arena would crush them.

This is the pattern, and it depends on a condition that is easy to miss: someone has to stay in the arena. The framework’s self-correcting capacity belongs to the framework and the citizens who use it together. Without them, the framework is paper. With them, it bends toward its own stated commitments (slowly, painfully, often after unconscionable delay, but it bends).

The capacity is not the guarantee. Each generation is capable of beginning something new, but capability requires exercise. The generation that sits in the audience, cataloguing the system’s imperfections from a comfortable analytical distance, is not exercising that capacity. They are watching the arena from the stands, and the arena is emptier for their absence.

I think about this when I look at my own generation’s relationship to the American project. We are the most informed, most analytically sophisticated, most comprehensively aware generation in the republic’s history, and we have scale. We can diagnose every failure. We can trace every mechanism. We can name every contradiction between what the nation promises and what it delivers.

And we are in danger of letting that awareness become its own form of disengagement, guilt, or reason for inaction. Awareness without action is a spectator sport. Diagnosis without construction is cynical, because it never requires you to be wrong.

The person who builds something can fail. The person who critiques has already succeeded by virtue of seeing clearly.

This isn’t only a left-coded failure mode. The right-coded version dresses differently and operates identically: the country is irretrievably corrupt, the institutions captured beyond repair, the only honest move is to refuse the whole apparatus. Both diagnoses are sharp enough to feel rigorous. Both end the same way. The person who stays in the arena gets called naive by the cynic and a collaborator by the demolitionist. Both names cover the same retreat.

The cynic resigns to taking, rather than building.

The burden of freedom is permanent. Staying in the arena means accepting that your contribution might be inadequate, your movement might fail, your generation’s correction might fall short. Douglass knew that. The suffragists knew that. May would say they acted through the anxiety, not after it resolved, because it never resolves. The anxiety of genuine action is permanent. It is also the price of doing something that matters.

The republic at 250 is imperfect. It has always been imperfect. The question has never been whether the framework is flawless. The question is whether this generation of citizens will do what every previous generation did: take the sentence literally, hold the nation accountable to its own stated principles, and build the next handhold.

The sentence is still there. It still says what it says. The work is still unfinished.

We keep building.

America, Our Dare — a series on the American experiment, for the 250th

Founding Fragility · A Government Designed to Be Wrong · We Keep Building · Selection Bias on the 250th

Sources and Inspiration

Man’s Search for Himself - Rollo May

The Human Condition - Hannah Arendt

On Fatherhood

Daniel Hatke — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:56:14 GMT

We have voles in the backyard, and after I did the dirty work, the yard needed repair: filling the trails and veins with soil, smoothing them out, laying seed. My son wanted to help. I knew it would 4x the time to completion. But, sign me up.

I had a bucket with soil and a small shovel. I showed him one go of the task. He could hardly be restrained from taking the shovel right out of my hands. He tried, missed, soil is everywhere. He’s yanking on the shovel which is jammed under the lips of the bucket and he’s about to spill the whole bucket. That is the moment I felt like sticking my hand in the job. He wasn’t causing a mess from mischievousness — he was dialing in his movements and trying. He’s three.

The hardest part of fatherhood is standing three feet away while your child struggles with something you could solve in seconds, and choosing not to reach in. Or choosing not to reach in knowing that the mess about to follow will be yours to clean up.

Because reaching in feels like love. The desire to smooth every path and remove every obstacle runs deep, almost gravitational: make it easier, fix the problem, resolve the frustration. Any parent knows this impulse. It arrives as warmth, as care, as the certainty that your help is what they need.

And sometimes your help is the very thing that takes from them what they need most.

Michael Lewis wrote a book about becoming a father called Home Game. Its central honesty is this: you have no idea what you’re doing. You show up at the hospital, your child arrives, and at no point does anyone verify that you’re qualified for what’s about to happen. Because you aren’t. Nobody is.

Lewis was being funny. But underneath the humor sits something the culture doesn’t handle well: the gap between the father you think you’re supposed to be and the father you actually are. And the modern answer to that gap is to optimize. Track the milestones. Schedule the enrichment. Download the app that tells you whether your three-year-old is on pace. Turn fatherhood into a project, because projects have metrics, and metrics tell you whether you’re doing it right.

This is a specific kind of mistake. It treats the child as clay: raw material that you shape, mold, and press into form through effort and intention. The father becomes the sculptor imposing a design. And the design is usually some version of the father himself, or worse, some version of what the father wishes he’d been.

But children aren’t clay. They’re marble.

Clay has no form until you impose one. Marble already has a figure inside it. Michelangelo understood this: the sculptor’s job is to remove what’s in the way. The work is subtractive. You study the stone. You attend to its grain, its fractures, its tendencies. You chisel carefully, working with the grain to reveal what the material is already becoming.

Lao Tzu named this practice twenty-five centuries ago: “In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped.” Fatherhood is closer to the second tradition than the first.

Timothy Gallwey called this the subtractive approach to excellence: performance improves by removing interference rather than by adding instruction. The capacity is already there. Your child already has temperament, instincts, curiosities, fears, and a developing will that belongs to them. The father’s work is removing what interferes with that emergence: the bad habits, the destructive patterns, the impulses that would calcify into character if left unattended. But the figure itself isn’t yours to decide.

This requires authoritative parenting, which is different from authoritarian parenting. Authoritarian is clay thinking: I impose the rules, you comply, the shape is mine to determine. Authoritative is marble thinking: I provide structure, I hold boundaries, I set expectations that serve the figure I can see emerging, and I adjust my approach as the form reveals itself. The authority is real. The boundaries are firm. The support is a deep well. But they exist for the child’s becoming rather than for the father’s control.

The sculptor works hard. This is not passivity dressed up as wisdom. Removing interference takes active attention, deliberate effort, and a kind of study that never ends. You have to watch the marble constantly to know what to remove next. You have to know when a crack is the stone breaking and when it’s the figure breathing. The father who stands back and lets everything happen neglects the work as thoroughly as the father who grips too tightly. The chisel does the work. Where you place it does the figure.

Fatherhood asks you to do two things that feel contradictory: be the strongest presence in your child’s life, and gradually make yourself less necessary. Cat Stevens wrote “Father and Son” about exactly this. I remember listening to it with my father. It still moves me.

Lao Tzu, again, wrote it twenty-five centuries ago: the best leader’s people barely know he exists. When his work is done, they say: “We did it, all by ourselves!” That’s the goal: presence so well-calibrated that the child’s strength felt like their own.

This is the yielding curve. Early on, the father is a pillar: solid, visible, bearing weight. The child leans on that pillar because they must. They learn what stability looks like by experiencing it in someone they trust. They learn what authority feels like when it’s exercised in their interest rather than against it.

Then the curve bends. The pillar becomes a bridge. The father’s job shifts from holding to connecting: connecting the child to their own judgment, their own capacity, their own growing sense of what they can handle. The boundaries widen rather than disappear. The expectations evolve and maybe steepen. What was “because I said so” becomes “because you understand why.”

And then the bridge becomes a witness. The father is still there. Still solid. But standing further back, watching the child test themselves against the world, and resisting every impulse to make it easier.

The urge to intervene when your child is struggling, failing, hurting. The urge to deploy what you know to spare them what you suffered. And the understanding, hard-won over years, that suffering is part of the chisel. If you take it away, you take away part of what reveals the figure.

What you give them instead is something no app can measure and no milestone can track: the sight of a human being who has been in the dirt before, who got back up, and who is still here.

This is fatherhood’s vulnerability. The real thing. Your child sees you fail and watches what you do next. Sees you afraid and watches whether you move forward anyway. Sees you confused, uncertain, in over your head, and files it away as evidence that confusion is survivable. That fear is walkable. That the dirt washes off.

Rollo May called this the daily conquest: freedom is not achieved once, it must be conquered each day. Fatherhood is the same. You don’t get to be a good father once and coast on the credential. You show up every morning, sometimes exhausted, sometimes unsure whether anything you’re doing is working, and you show up anyway. The daily conquest of fatherhood is: be present. Not perfect. Present. Available. Human.

And the reward for this daily work is something deeper than satisfaction. Watch a child who has been struggling with something finally break through, because you held the space while they helped themselves. The look on their face. The laugh. May called this joy: the affect that comes when we use our powers. And the father’s joy, watching it happen, mirrors the child’s. You feel it because something you built is working. The marble is showing its figure.

We talk about what strong individuals make possible for institutions and civilizations. But we rarely trace the chain back far enough. Strong individuals don’t emerge from nowhere. They emerge from homes where someone modeled what strength looks like: the willingness to bear weight without making the weight someone else’s problem.

The shadow masculine energy I wrote about recently has a significant source here, among others. Somewhere in the chain, a father was missing. Or present but authoritarian, imposing shape on clay. Or present but passive, watching marble crack without picking up a chisel. Or present but optimizing — calibrating every input, scheduling every minute, refusing to trust the marble at all.

The helicopter parent and the authoritarian parent are mirror images. One smothers the figure with attention; the other carves it to a pattern fixed in advance. Both refuse to trust the marble.

Robert Bly, drawing on Alexander Mitscherlich, named the mechanism:

If the son does not actually see what his father does during the day and through all the seasons of the year, a hole will appear in the son’s psyche, and the hole will fill with demons who tell him that his father’s work is evil and that the father is evil.

The shadow forms are, in part, the result of fathers who couldn’t hold both sides: structure and yielding, authority and vulnerability, presence and restraint.

Some truths belong to the household. The truth that striving builds character, that difficulty is the medium of growth, that freedom is constituted by the willingness to bear weight: these are formative truths. Aristotle named the mechanism twenty-three centuries ago: we become builders by building, just by doing just actions, brave by doing brave actions. Character is formed by repeated doing under the right conditions. You learn this by watching your father get up after falling down. You learn it when the person who could most easily solve your problem trusts you to solve it yourself.

The civilization depends on this. Free societies require people capable of bearing freedom, and the capacity for bearing freedom starts in the home, with a father who understands that his most important work is the interference he removes rather than the shape he imposes. The figure was always there. His job was to believe that, and to chisel with care until it emerged.

I don’t have this figured out. I feel the pull every day: to intervene, to instruct, to make it easier, to deploy what I know in service of outcomes I can see. And every day I have to remind myself that the marble has a figure inside it, and my job is to trust what’s there while working carefully with the grain.

The stakes go up as they grow. The failures become more consequential. The space between you and them widens, and the yielding curve demands that you let it widen, even when everything in you wants to close the gap.

But I think this is what it means to be a father. The version that shows up, rather than the one that optimizes or performs having it together. The one who has been in the dirt and can show you how to get the mud off. The one who holds the chisel with care because he knows the figure is already there, waiting to be revealed.

Sources and Inspiration

The Inner Game of Tennis - Timothy Gallwey

Man’s Search for Himself - Rollo May

Home Game - Michael Lewis

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu

Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle

Iron John: A Book About Men - Robert Bly

A Government Designed to Be Wrong

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:51:56 GMT

America, Our Dare — a series on the American experiment, for the 250th

Founding Fragility · A Government Designed to Be Wrong · We Keep Building · Selection Bias on the 250th

The windows of the State House were shut against the Philadelphia summer, which also meant shut against anyone listening. Fifty-five men in a sweltering room, sentries at the doors, a secrecy rule so strict that nothing said inside would reach the public until the work was finished. James Madison sat near the front and took notes he wouldn’t allow published until every delegate in the room was dead.

For roughly five thousand years of recorded civilization, the answer to “who governs?” had been the same: somebody born to it. Pharaoh, emperor, king, chief, divine right, bloodline, conquest sanctified by time. The structure never changed. One person or one family ruled, and everybody else was ruled. It worked well enough, often enough, for long enough that attempting to change it was deadly.

The men in that room were there to try.

They weren’t starting from scratch. The Articles of Confederation had already failed. The Revolution had been won (barely, by fog and desperate gambles), and the country it created was falling apart. States printed their own money, ignored their debts, quarreled over borders. The Continental Congress couldn’t raise taxes or enforce its own decisions. European observers gave the experiment a few more years before it collapsed into either monarchy or anarchy.

The men in that room knew this. Many of them had fought for independence. Some had signed the Declaration. They were lawyers, merchants, plantation owners, speculators, war veterans. They were also slaveholders, land grabbers, and creditors protecting their interests. They were not demigods arriving with a blueprint. They were politicians arriving with agendas, arguing for four months about a form of government that had never existed at this scale.

What they produced was something stranger than perfect. It was a system designed by men who assumed they’d get things wrong.

The genius of anticipated failure

Monarchy doesn’t need an amendment process. If the king is sovereign by divine right, the system is correct by definition. Error belongs to the subjects, not the structure.

Karl Popper, writing from exile during the Second World War, identified this assumption as the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. He called it historicism: the belief that someone, somewhere, has access to the correct answer. Plato’s philosopher-kings. Hegel’s unfolding Spirit. Marx’s inevitable revolution. The content changes. The structure remains: if you know the destination, everyone who disagrees is an obstacle.

What happened in Philadelphia was the opposite of this. The framers designed a system premised on the idea that no one has access to the correct answer. Not the president. Not the Congress. Not the courts. Not the framers themselves. Article V of the Constitution is the most radical sentence in the document: it provides the mechanism for the people to change anything in it, including, in theory, Article V.

These men had egos that could fill the room. Hamilton wanted a president for life. Madison arrived with a plan to override state legislatures entirely. The Virginia delegation wanted representation by population; the New Jersey delegation wanted equal votes regardless of size. They fought bitterly about every clause.

Madison’s plan to extend Congress’s veto over all state laws was defeated, 7-3-1. Even Madison didn’t get the centralization he wanted. The compromise that survived left more room for state-level wrongness than he thought wise.

But the system they built encoded a specific epistemological commitment: we might be wrong. Madison made the commitment explicit in Federalist 51. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. The whole architecture turned on the assumption that men are not angels: ambition would have to counteract ambition, and flawed creatures would need machinery to constrain themselves. Joseph Ellis would later document how the post-ratification decade nearly tore the republic apart. The pattern was there in Philadelphia. The Constitution wasn’t consensus. It was negotiated truce. The three-fifths compromise on slavery was morally catastrophic. The electoral college was a jury-rigged solution to a problem no one could solve cleanly. The Bill of Rights had to be added later because the original document didn’t protect individual liberties explicitly enough.

Every one of these flaws was real. And the framework included the mechanism for addressing them. That mechanism is the point.

The framers’ question wasn’t who should rule. It was how to design institutions so the wrong ruler does limited damage. Elections, separation of powers, impeachment, amendment: every mechanism assumes the next person in the chair might be wrong.

The slaveholders wrote a framework through which slavery was abolished. The men who excluded women from voting built a system that eventually extended the franchise to everyone. The elitists who feared mob rule created institutions that, over two centuries, became more democratic than anything they imagined or intended. The correction happened through the framework. Dismissing the mechanism because its creators were flawed is dismissing the very process through which those flaws got corrected.

I’ve done both versions of the dismissal: gold-leaf reverence and tainted-origin contempt. Most of us lean one direction. They’re the same error, treating the founders as the point, when the founders built something designed to outlast and outgrow them.

A system for people who don’t know the future

Hannah Arendt called the ability to begin something new “natality.” Every human being arrives as a fresh start, capable of doing what has never been done. The founding was an act of natality at civilizational scale: a beginning, not the application of a theory. The framers were starting something they couldn’t predict.

Arendt’s insight matters here because it rescues the founding from two traps. The first is inevitability (it was always going to happen this way, manifest destiny, God’s plan for America). The second is cynicism (they were just protecting their property, the ideals were cover for self-interest). Both flatten the genuine uncertainty of the moment. These were people acting into a future they couldn’t see, making commitments they couldn’t guarantee, and building in the assumption that the people who came after them would need to fix what they got wrong.

The amendment process has been used twenty-seven times. The thirteenth abolished slavery. The nineteenth gave women the vote. The twenty-sixth lowered the voting age to eighteen. Each amendment was a correction, an admission that the previous version was incomplete. This is constitutional piecemeal repair: test, discover the error, correct. The slow, grinding, imperfect work of making a flawed system less flawed.

Alexis de Tocqueville, arriving from France in the 1830s, saw something in American life that had no equivalent in Europe. Americans governed themselves daily. They formed associations to build schools, maintain roads, organize churches, solve problems. They didn’t wait for a king or a ministry. The township, Tocqueville thought, was to freedom what primary schools are to science: the place where citizens first learn the habit of governing themselves. Self-governance practiced in small rooms, over questions that affected their actual lives.

This is the other half of the bet. The Constitution provided the structure. But the structure only works if citizens fill it with the habit of governing themselves. Tocqueville’s warning was that democracy could hollow itself out, citizens gradually surrendering self-determination for the comfort of being managed. The framework holds only as long as enough people keep choosing to use it.

We inherited this. The founding was fragile. The framework that survived is fragile too, in a different way. Its fragility is civic rather than military: whether the people living inside the system still understand what it asks of them.

The bet the framers made was that ordinary citizens, given the tools of self-correction, would keep improving an imperfect government. That future generations would use Article V instead of abandoning the project. That people who inherited freedom’s burden would choose to carry it rather than hand it to someone who promises to carry it for them.

I think about this when I watch people on both sides talk about the founders. The reverence and the contempt share something: both treat the founding as settled. One side says it was great and needs restoring. The other says it was rotten and needs replacing. Neither reckons with the possibility that the founders’ actual genius was building a system that asks to be used. Argued over, amended, extended, corrected. Worked.

The radical bet was that we would keep fixing it.

Two hundred and fifty years in, the question is whether we’re still making that bet. Whether we still believe the slow, exhausting, imperfect work of self-governance is worth the trouble. Whether we’re still the kind of people who would rather argue about how to fix a flawed system than surrender the argument to someone who claims to have the answer.

I think we are. But believing it isn’t enough. The founders didn’t just believe in self-governance. They practiced it, daily, in rooms that were too hot, with people they couldn’t stand, over problems they couldn’t solve. The bet renews itself only in the practice.

The system is still here. The mechanism still works. The bet, as always, is on the people who fill it.

America, Our Dare — a series on the American experiment, for the 250th

Founding Fragility · A Government Designed to Be Wrong · We Keep Building · Selection Bias on the 250th

Sources and Inspiration

The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation - Joseph J. Ellis

1776 - David McCullough

The Human Condition - Hannah Arendt

On Envy

Daniel Hatke — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:50:56 GMT

On Friday morning, before the market opened, a few hundred thousand people who will never see the inside of a Goldman Sachs allocation meeting picked up their phones and placed orders to own a piece of a rocket company. Most of them asked for a hundred shares and were handed twenty.

This is not how it usually goes. The richest day in a company's life, the initial public offering, is normally a velvet-rope event. The shares at the offering price go to hedge funds, pensions, university endowments, the institutions whose orders arrive through a banker who owes them a favor. The regular investor gets to buy in later, in the afternoon, at whatever price the morning's excitement has already inflated. The gate that keeps ordinary people out of the wealth-creation event is old and quiet and almost never mentioned, because almost no one on the outside of it knows it is there.

This week the gate came down. SpaceX set aside up to thirty percent of the largest public offering in history for retail buyers, against a normal five to ten. Institutions piled in so hard they clawed the retail share back to the low twenties, still triple what an ordinary investor ever sees. Fidelity dropped the threshold to get in the door from five hundred thousand dollars to two thousand. The orders that came back through Robinhood and SoFi and Schwab added up to something north of a hundred billion dollars, more than the entire company was raising, placed by people buying in two-thousand-dollar increments. Bankers who price these for a living haven't seen retail demand like it.

And by the closing bell, with the stock up nineteen percent, just shy of a hundred and sixty-one dollars, the man who founded the company was worth more than a trillion dollars. The first human being to cross that line.

I want to be explicit about what that number is, because almost everyone describing it this weekend has it wrong.

The people made him a trillionaire

A trillion dollars is not a vault. There is no room where it sits. Ninety-some percent of it is stock he has never sold in two companies that mostly have not yet done the things their price assumes they will do: land people on Mars, wire the planet for broadband, move the world's cars onto electricity. The Washington Post, no friend of the man, put it precisely in its own headline: the world's first trillionaire, on paper.

Benjamin Graham, who taught Warren Buffett how to think about this, said the market is a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine in the long run. In the short run it counts votes. In the long run it weighs whether the thing was real. A trillion-dollar valuation is a tally of votes: a live, second-by-second count of how much a very large number of people believe a company will be worth. It is the public pricing one man's contribution in real time, and the contribution is enormous, and the price is the public's verdict on it.

Here is the part the weekend missed. The market is made of people, and people come in sizes. A multibillion-dollar fund and a nurse with a brokerage app are both casting votes; they are just weighted differently, and on the day that matters most, the small voters almost never get to vote at all. This week they did. The gate came down, the thresholds dropped, and a few hundred thousand ordinary people put their own money behind a man building rockets. They didn't get robbed. They lined up.

The market is a voting machine, and this week the smallest voters were finally let into the booth.

So when a senator goes on television to announce that trillionaires should not be allowed to exist, that this is a wealth transfer happening at your expense, there is a fact standing in the doorway. The people she means to protect were the ones placing the orders. They wanted twenty shares of the rocket company, and most of them wished they'd been handed the full hundred.

I'll grant the strongest version of the objection before going on, because it's real: a regular person buying into a euphoric offering at the top is one of the classic ways regular people lose money. That's Graham's weighing machine, and it does its work slowly. The vote happened Friday. The weighing happens over years, as the company delivers or doesn't. But notice what the objection concedes. It concedes that the bet was theirs to make. For once they were allowed into the room where fortunes are placed, and the dignity of that is not erased by the risk of it. Agency and risk are the same coin. You cannot hand someone the upside and protect them from the downside; the protection is the gate, and the gate is what just came down.

The model becomes the obstacle

Watch the feed the same hour the number crossed. The man is a parasite. He produces nothing. He took this from you. He should not be permitted to hold it. Whatever you think of him, sit with the speed of the reaction: a person creates more measurable value than anyone in the history of the species has created, and the dominant emotional response, within the hour, is that he must be stopped from having done it.

Charlie Munger watched markets for sixty years and concluded the thing that really drives the world is envy: the inability to bear that someone else has more. He thought it the strangest of the deadly sins because it's the only one that offers its practitioner no pleasure at all, not even the brief kind. You just suffer it, and call it justice.

René Girard, a French thinker who spent his life on the structure of human wanting, explained why the suffering scales the way it does. Desire, he argued, is rarely a straight line from a person to a thing. There is almost always a third figure in the picture: a model, someone whose wanting we copy without admitting we're copying it. When the model is far away, a saint, a hero, a figure on a mountain, we worship openly and feel no rivalry. But when the model comes close, when he is a peer, a neighbor, someone on the same plane as us, the worship curdles. The man we'd emulate becomes the man in our way. Girard's image is a sentry at the gate of paradise who shows you the entrance and bars it with the same gesture. The model becomes the obstacle. And then we hide the admiration even from ourselves, and what's left showing is the hatred.

Girard's claim was that envy does not spread because people have gotten worse. It spreads because the distance between people collapses. The modern emotions flourish, he wrote, "because internal mediation triumphs in a universe where the differences between men are gradually erased." Envy needs a peer. The duke did not envy the blacksmith; their worlds never touched. You envy the classmate one salary band up, the friend whose post outperformed yours, the neighbor with the better year, because those worlds touch yours completely.

Now hold the two halves of this week together, because they are the same fact. The thing that let the nurse buy her twenty shares is the collapse of distance: the gate down, the threshold dropped, the billionaire's company suddenly something an ordinary person could own a sliver of from her couch. And the thing that turned that same billionaire into an object of instant hatred is the same collapse of distance. When he is near enough to buy, he is near enough to resent. Equality is the engine of the verdict and the engine of the envy. The flattening that invites you in is the flattening that tells you the man who built the door is your enemy.

The same collapse of distance that lets the neighbor buy a share is what turns the man who built the rocket into everyone's obstacle.

Girard had one more piece, and it's the one that keeps this from being a story about a single senator and a single tribe. He called the two-person version of it double mediation: a closed loop where each side copies the other's wanting and each accuses the other of starting it, "opposed but alike, and even interchangeable, for they make exactly the same movements." Peoples and politicians, he wrote, "blame each other, with the greatest possible sincerity, for the conflicts between them."

Look at the two poles and you find the identical machine running different software. The left names the billionaire: he hoarded it, tax it back, no one should have that much. The right names a different mediator: the globalists, the coastal elites, the credentialed class who rigged the game and look down on you. The object on the table changes. The geometry never does. Both convert they have more than I do into they must have taken it from me, because the second sentence is bearable and the first one is not. Resentment of the person ahead of you is the most bipartisan emotion in American life. We have simply built, in the feed, the most efficient machine for manufacturing it that has ever existed: a device that puts every successful stranger on earth at arm's length, all day, forever. The triangle used to need a village. Now it runs between you and twenty thousand people you'll never meet.

Emulate, don't envy

There is an exit, and Robert Greene named it in three words: transmute envy into emulation. The comparing machine in the head doesn't have an off switch. What it has is a direction. The same engine that produces he should be stopped can produce I want to build the thing I'd want to live near, and the difference between those two sentences is the difference between a culture that makes things and a culture that divides them.

Resentment is manufactured for you. Emulation is the version you have to choose.

Moses Kagan, who invests in unglamorous real estate and writes about it, put the constructive version better than I can:

"The next trillionaire will undoubtedly get there by solving some very important problems (like advancing electrification of global personal transportation by a decade or more, dramatically cutting the dollar-per-kilogram of taking stuff to orbit, or supplying wireless broadband internet to the entire planet). I want to live in the world that person will help create."

That is the whole argument in two sentences, and the second one carries it. I want to live in the world that person will help create. You can hold that and still think the man who built it is difficult, reckless, wrong about half of what he says on any given Tuesday. The fortune is beside the point. What matters is what had to exist for it to be possible, and almost all of it is now load-bearing in other people's lives: the rocket that cut the cost of orbit, the network reaching villages no cable ever would, the cars. Matt Ridley spent a book showing that this is how prosperity has always worked, that wealth compounds when ideas meet and combine and that the people who set the combining in motion capture a thin slice of what they release into everyone else's hands. The builder, in Ridley's phrase, is "flotsam bobbing upriver on the tidal bore of invention," a current that long outruns him. The slice looks obscene. The river is the point.

And this, finally, is why I find myself with no political home this week. One side looks at the trillion and sees only the slice, and wants it back, and calls the wanting justice. The other has mostly stopped talking about building anything at all, trading the future for grievance and spectacle and a smaller, older country that never quite existed. Both are selling the same thing in different packaging: that the pie is fixed and your job is to guard your piece. I don't want the pie guarded. I want it bigger, and I want to be governed by people who can still tell the difference between a man who took something and a man who made something.

But the feed sets the terms. It does not get final authorship. That is the one thing it cannot take unless I hand it over. The gate came down for one strange week, and a few hundred thousand people walked through it and bought a piece of a future they'd rather live in than resent. The loudest voices in the country spent the same week insisting the man on the other side had locked them out. He hadn't. The door was open. It is still open. You were actively invited, unlike most times. What's left is the part no senator can legislate and no algorithm decides for you: whether you walk through doors like that and build something on the far side, or stand in front of them the rest of your life, certain you were robbed, nursing the one sin that was never any fun to begin with. That posture was always yours to choose. It is the only thing in this whole story that actually is.

Sources and Inspiration

The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham

Poor Charlie's Almanack - Charlie Munger

Deceit, Desire, and the Novel - René Girard

The Laws of Human Nature - Robert Greene

How the World Really Works - Vaclav Smil

The Thing Underneath Everything

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:01:41 GMT

In 1909, a German chemist named Fritz Haber found a way to make ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen, under pressure, using catalysts and heat. Four years later Carl Bosch had scaled the process at BASF into an industrial system. The chemistry is hard. The result is simple. The nitrogen that crops need to grow can now be pulled out of the air at industrial scale, on demand, in whatever quantity the global food system requires.

In 2020, roughly four of the eight billion humans alive on this planet owed their existence to that process. They eat the wheat and the rice and the maize grown with the fertilizer it produces. The reactor that produces the fertilizer runs on natural gas. There is no commercial non-carbon alternative deployable at the scale the species currently requires. None.

This is settled accounting. The numbers come from the energy and materials scientist who has spent forty years counting what modern civilization actually runs on. Most of those four billion people will live their entire lives without knowing the fact. So will most of the other four.

Which raises a question I want to walk through carefully, because I think it sits underneath almost every other civic problem we have. What kind of citizen does a democracy need when the systems it depends on become this technical?

The bar is lower than the technocrats imagine. A democracy works when a citizen can trust the peers and institutions handling the technical detail, when they want the future more than they fear it, and when they hold enough basic numeracy to recognize compounding when it shows up in the data they encounter, and enough historical literacy to read the record of human progress without the distortion of nostalgia.

This essay is about the citizen we still need, and my attempt to help you be one.

What civilization actually runs on

Cement. Steel. Plastics. Ammonia. These are the four pillars of modern civilization. In 2019, the world consumed about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, 370 million tons of plastics, 150 million tons of ammonia. Making them eats roughly seventeen percent of global primary energy and produces a quarter of all fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions. None of the four is readily replaceable at scale. There is no other industrial material with steel's strength-to-cost ratio, no other malleable polymer family that does what plastics do, no other binder that produces reinforced concrete, no other way to fix atmospheric nitrogen at the rate ammonia synthesis does.

The four pillars is Vaclav Smil's phrase. He has spent forty years counting the biophysical substrate of modern life and has written more than forty books about it. His 2022 popularizing summary How the World Really Works is where the figures above come from. Smil is not making a moral argument. He is making a material one. The morality is what the reader has to do afterward.

Underneath the four pillars sits a second layer Smil insists is even less visible than the first. The diesel engine, fed with refined crude, moves nearly everything humans move at scale. Container ships, freight trains, long-haul trucks, ocean-going bulk carriers, the equipment that plants and harvests almost all industrial agriculture. The popular story of globalization is digital. The actual story is mechanical. Most of what is in your kitchen and most of what is on your back spent thirty days on a ship whose 109,000-horsepower diesel engine burned 4,650 tons of low-grade residual oil to push twenty-three thousand other steel boxes across the ocean. The internet coordinates the chain. Diesel and the box are the chain.

This is what Smil means by substrate. Every other domain we talk about (food, housing, transport, communication, medicine, sanitation) rests on a thicket of bulk materials and energy flows whose mass and timescale most public conversation has never engaged.

The substrate also explains why decarbonization arguments that ignore the four pillars are missing most of the problem. The electricity grid is only about a fifth of final global energy use. Roughly eighty percent of what humanity actually uses energy for is industrial heat, transportation, and processes the grid does not touch. A debate about electric vehicles is a debate about something less than a fifth of the problem. A debate about renewable electricity is a debate about another fraction of the same fifth. The other four-fifths sit under steel mills, cement kilns, fertilizer plants, smelters, refineries, container ships, and the kilometer-deep mines that supply them. The grid does not reach any of them.

Energy is the layer everything else sits on.

Smil's discipline through the book is to refuse moral framing. He is impatient with apocalyptic environmentalism and equally impatient with Silicon Valley solutionism. His standing line is that "we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon." Stripping that combustion out by 2050, he writes elsewhere in the same book, is conceivable only "at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances." He endorses neither. He refuses the both-poles framing in which one has to be chosen.

What the book does instead is count. Cement in tons. Ammonia in tons. Energy in joules. CO₂ in gigatons. Transitions in decades. The numbers do not by themselves say what should be done. They do say what is. And what is, in Smil's accounting, is a civilization whose material dependencies cannot be rearranged on a presidential election cycle or a quarterly earnings call.

The secret silent miracle

The substrate exists. The question that should sit next to it is harder than it sounds. What has that substrate produced?

For thirty years, the same experiment kept producing the same result. Audiences around the world, including medical students, journalists, hedge-fund managers, and Nobel laureates, were given thirteen multiple-choice questions about the basic state of the world. What share of children are vaccinated. How extreme poverty has changed. How life expectancy has moved. Almost everyone failed, and they failed in the same direction. They guessed at a darker, more frightening, more polarized world than the one the data described. A chimpanzee picking randomly would have scored thirty-three percent. The human average was closer to sixteen. The error was in their biased thought, not random.

The experimenter was Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician and global-health professor who spent the last decade of his life turning that finding into Factfulness. What the data actually show, in his reading, is what he called the secret silent miracle of human progress.

The share of humanity living in extreme poverty was eighty-five percent in 1800, twenty-nine percent twenty years before he wrote, nine percent in 2017. Life expectancy at birth was thirty years in 1800. It is seventy-two now. Eighty-eight percent of one-year-olds globally are vaccinated against something. Sixty percent of girls in low-income countries finish primary school: most audiences guess twenty. Deaths from natural disasters have fallen to about six percent per capita of what they were a century ago.

Rosling was careful, and the carefulness is what saves the book from the cheerful-progress cartoon it's enemies might try to paint it to be. He refused the optimist label. He coined the word possibilist for the stance he wanted:

"I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naïve. I'm a very serious 'possibilist.' That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview."

The possibilist holds two thoughts at once. The world is bad. The world is better. A premature baby in an incubator is both improving and critical. The trend can be sharply upward and the situation can still be unacceptable. The discipline is to keep both in mind without flinching toward consolation or despair.

What Rosling diagnoses across the book is the cognitive equipment that makes the directional error so reliable. Ten dramatic instincts — gap, negativity, straight line, fear, size, generalization, destiny, single perspective, blame, urgency — each adaptive in the small-group environments where human cognition evolved, each catastrophically miscalibrated for the modern information environment. The fear instinct selects for what is frightening over what is dangerous. Plane crashes and shark attacks pass through the filter. Diarrhea and traffic accidents, which actually kill far more people, do not.

Heat kills more Europeans each year than guns kill Americans. Heat deaths in Europe ran above forty-seven thousand last year. Gun deaths in the United States ran below it.

The fear instinct selects for what is frightening over what is dangerous. Plane crashes pass through the filter. Diarrhea does not.

The lift Rosling counts and the substrate Smil counts are the same civilization seen from two angles. Rosling shows what has actually happened to human lives across two centuries. Smil shows what it physically takes to keep that happening. Both stories are true. Read together, they describe a species that has accomplished one of the most dramatic improvements in human welfare in recorded history while embedding itself ever more deeply in material flows that are not obviously sustainable.

I want to take a smaller scale now, because the global numbers are easy to nod at and forget. Let me put myself in the picture.

In Smil's book there is a kitchen-table demonstration. Take a tomato from a heated greenhouse in Almería, the kind shipped to a Scandinavian supermarket in February. Slice it. Pour five tablespoons of dark oil over the slices. That is what you are looking at when you put a winter tomato on a salad in a Northern European supermarket. About 650 milliliters of embedded diesel fuel per kilogram of fruit. Most of it for the greenhouse heat, some for the transport, the rest for the fertilizer that grew the plant. Smil's point is the consumer surface that hides the substrate, not the tomato itself.

I have eaten foods like this in the winter myself. I have rarely thought about it. I certainly have never broken it down.

The same blindness runs through my electric bill. Once a month a dollar amount arrives in my email. I pay it. If asked what fraction of that dollar amount paid for heat, what fraction for hot water, what fraction for the refrigerator, what fraction for the lights, I could not tell you with much confidence. I have lived in this house for years. Even the writer who reads about energy for fun cannot decompose his own monthly bill.

The substrate underneath the dollar amount is invisible to me. I am someone who reads about energy for fun.

The blindness extends upward. The civic story that has run through 2025 and into 2026 in my part of the algorithm is data center water use. Counties holding up permits. Citizen groups filing public-records requests. Op-eds measuring the cost of artificial intelligence in gallons. Denver City Council voted unanimously to halt new data centers for twelve months, effective the week this essay was finalized.

The data is public. In 2023, all the data centers in the United States combined consumed about seventeen billion gallons of water for direct cooling, plus roughly two hundred billion gallons more indirectly through the electricity that powered them. Call it two hundred twenty-eight billion gallons all in, on the most generous accounting.

In the same year, residential lawn irrigation in the United States consumed about three and a third trillion gallons. California almonds alone consumed roughly one and a half trillion more. The lawns the country waters and the almonds it grows together used something like twenty times more water than every AI query, every CRM database, every video stream, text message, and Instagram Reel the country generated combined.

No one seems to be protesting almonds.

What is doing the work is the dramatic instinct. Data centers are new, technological, corporate, and run by companies whose names trigger something. Lawns and almonds are familiar, agricultural, residential, and run by no one whose name I know besides my neighbors' 2500sqft of turf. The fear filter passes one and not the other, exactly as Rosling diagnosed. The inflamed group does not care that the math runs the other way.

These three blindnesses cut across partisan lines and across the question of good faith. They are the routine condition of a human being trying to make sense of a technical civilization through interfaces (the supermarket shelf, the monthly bill, the news headline) that were designed to hide the substrate rather than expose it. The civilization functions because the substrate is hidden. The democracy functions, when it functions, because someone bothers to look.

The dramatic-instinct economy Rosling diagnosed runs on these blindnesses. Every successive incentive in the chain that connects the substrate to the citizen (advertising, branding, retail, journalism, social media, political campaigning) selects for vividness over accuracy and for emotional valence over orders of magnitude or analytical thought. The miscalibration is the system's product, not its malfunction.

The pencil on your desk required loggers in Oregon and graphite miners in Sri Lanka, and not one of them knows how to make a pencil alone. Two strangers, neither related, swap two different objects at the same time. Both walk away better off. Multiply that across a population, repeat for a hundred thousand years, and the species' intelligence stops being held in any one head and starts being held in the exchange itself.

The word for this is Hayek's: catallaxy, the spontaneous order generated by exchange and specialization. Hayek named it. The third voice in this dialogue carried it from political economy into deep human history. Matt Ridley is a zoologist who, in mid-career, turned into a popularizer of evolutionary thinking. His 2010 book The Rational Optimist extends Darwin and Adam Smith into a single explanation of how the modern world got so rich.

Ridley's deeper claim is that the catallaxy compounds when ideas can find each other, and that the rate at which ideas can find each other has accelerated faster than any other variable in human life since 1800. Population multiplied six times. Real income rose nine times. Life expectancy more than doubled. Vietnamese poverty fell from ninety percent to thirty in twenty years. The hockey stick is real.

But Ridley does something else that matters for the substrate question. He grounds the catallaxy in physics. The hockey stick rests on cheap dense energy in sufficient supply. Coal made every modern person, in Ridley's image, a little Louis XIV. By his arithmetic, it would take roughly a hundred and fifty human beings pedaling exercise bicycles in eight-hour shifts to deliver the energy the average global citizen consumes. Six hundred and sixty for the average American. Modern prosperity rests on cheap dense energy: it is the substitute for the form of slavery cheap dense energy made uneconomic.

Rosling counts the lift. Smil counts the substrate. Ridley names the mechanism that ties them together. The catallaxy needed the substrate to produce the lift. The substrate exists. The lift is profound. The three voices converge.

And here is where the dialogue produces something none of them quite says alone.

The three accountings are public knowledge. They are in mainstream books written for general audiences. They are taught nowhere in particular. The conversation that should follow from them, about what kind of civilization we want, what we are willing to spend to keep it, what we are willing to lose to change it, is conducted instead through the interfaces I named in the last section. Through headlines that confuse stocks with flows. Through bills whose components are illegible. Through the dramatic-instinct economy that selects for the photogenic over the load-bearing.

The catallaxy needed the substrate to produce the lift. The conversation that should follow from those three accountings is conducted through headlines, bills, and slogans.

Vaclav Smil wrote, near the start of his book, a sentence I want to give in full because it is the civic argument the whole substrate project is making in one line:

"The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities."

This is the turn. The substrate of consent is a different thing than the conclusions consent should reach. The substrate of consent is the minimum civic numeracy that lets the conclusions be reached at all. A citizen who cannot tell a megawatt from a megawatt-hour cannot consent to the energy decisions made in their name. A citizen who has never looked at the four pillars cannot meaningfully weigh in on what they are worth and what should replace them. Self-rule in a technical civilization requires self-acquaintance with the systems being ruled.

The point lands harder because of when we are. The two decades behind us were a window in which the binding constraints were attention, code, and cheap money. The substrate could be hidden behind the interface. That window is closing. The energy needed to train and run artificial intelligence, the chips required to build it, the manufacturing required to build the chips, the materials and mines and diesel substrate the manufacturing rests on, are all reasserting themselves as the binding constraint on the next decade. The physical world is coming back. The numeracy that did not matter when the constraint was attention now matters because the constraint is joules.

The substrate of consent

I have written before about the politics of energy. One essay diagnosed historicism, the conviction that history has a knowable destination, as the failure mode driving signal-first energy policies across Western democracies in our own decade. Another, future piece under construction now, lays out specific proposals (a carbon price, nuclear deployment at scale, transmission infrastructure, the institutional posture I think the environmental movement built in the 1970s and now needs to revise) and will argue for them under my own name. Both of those essays argued. This essay does not. It establishes the substrate underneath argument. The numeracy without which no argument about energy can begin.

Numeracy is a virtue you practice into. Start with six numbers and three rules.

The six numbers: four billion people alive because of synthetic ammonia. The four pillars in tons in 2019: 4.5 billion of cement, 1.8 billion of steel, 370 million of plastics, 150 million of ammonia. Eighty percent of human energy use the grid does not touch. Global life expectancy thirty years in 1800, seventy-two now. The share of humanity in extreme poverty, eighty-five percent in 1800 and nine percent in 2017. A hundred and fifty humans on exercise bicycles to deliver the average global citizen's energy, six hundred and sixty for the American.

The three rules: stock versus flow, watt versus watt-hour, percentage of new capacity versus percentage of total use. The discipline of pausing on a headline long enough to ask the unit, the kind, the denominator. A thirty-second move. It catches most of the innumeracy modernity throws at you.

The willingness to be the person at the dinner table who asks. Not because numbers settle arguments. They do not. But because the argument cannot even begin without them.

The chain runs Individual → Society → Civilization. We say it often at the Dispatch. In a technical age, the first link does the work the rest depends on. Knowing what you do not know about the systems you vote on is the smallest version of self-rule.

Sources and Inspiration

Factfulness - Hans Rosling

Numbers Don't Lie - Vaclav Smil

The Mind Virus Is a Choice

Daniel Hatke — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:28:12 GMT

I caught myself doing it again last week. Scrolling the push-notification headlines before bed: some number about the debt crossing the size of the whole economy, some line about a generation getting hollowed out to pay for the older, richer one. I felt the familiar slump. The one that says the good years are behind us, the system is rigged, and the smart move is to expect less and guard what little is left.

Fighting posture. Fisticuffs instead of slumber.

I sat in it for a second. Then I remembered saying almost exactly that out loud a few months back, blaming one cohort for taking from another, running the grim math, landing on the shrug. And I remember thinking afterward: I don’t actually believe that. I keep reaching for it because it’s available. It’s easy. It’s vindicating.

Ultimately, it’s envy of a sort.

That slump has a name once you watch where it goes. It starts as a mood, a gloom about the country and the future, and the mood is only the on-ramp. What it merges onto is a whole way of seeing, and the way of seeing is this: the pie is fixed. From that one assumption everything follows. If the pie is fixed, then more for you is less for me. Wanting more becomes a kind of greed. Using less becomes a kind of virtue to signal. And the highest virtue is making sure your neighbor uses less too, or turning your politics vindictive and voting for the guy promising to take.

Call it what it is. A mind virus.

Its native tongue is the language of smaller: shrink the economy, lower the ceiling on progress, divide the pile more “fairly,” and learn, all of us, that taking is better than building.

The virus: therefore the future is over. The one that does the damage: therefore we should all learn to live with less, take what we need. You may disagree with the framing and say: yes, we do need to live with less but that doesn’t mean taking. I say, that may be fine for you and some subset of individuals. But on the whole, human behavior will trend toward the taking in a shrinking pie, even if it is only imagination.

The pie is not fixed. It never was.

The same small room

The virus is bipartisan, which is the part each side misses because each is certain it’s the other one’s disease. The left dialect is loud about it: the rich have too much, so take it; consume less to save the planet. The right dialect swears it’s the cure, not the sickness: the great days are behind us, so wall it off; they are taking our jobs, our country, our future; retreat to something smaller and older and safer. One side wants to ration the pie out of guilt. The other wants to fence it off out of fear. Both have already decided the pie will never grow again. Degrowth and decline are the same animal in different coats. The faces flee in opposite directions and meet at the back of the same small room.

Erich Fromm gave us the shape of that room eighty-five years ago. Freedom, he saw, is a burden before it is a gift. When no one is telling you what to believe or who to be or what your life should mean, an anxiety sets in that is hard to name, and the human animal will do almost anything to set the weight down. Submit to a strongman. Dissolve into the crowd. There is a quieter one he doesn’t name, though his logic invites it: choose the smaller life on purpose. A fixed pie is a kind of relief. If nothing can grow, nothing is being asked of you. You don’t have to build, or risk, or change. You only have to divide what’s here and police the appetite of whoever wants more. Despair is a way of putting freedom down without admitting you’ve done it.

The physicist David Deutsch split societies into two kinds, and the split is really about this. A static society survives by suppressing change, and to manage it the society has to shrink its own people, raise them to want only what is already allowed. A dynamic society survives by absorbing change, and it grows. Deutsch caught the word “sustain” hiding two meanings: to provide for someone, and to keep them from changing. The smallness creed wants the second and advertises the first. It says it is protecting you. It is freezing you. Halting you. Crushing your dreams and progress.

The politician points to Ken Griffin. I point to your own thoughts. Only one of those do you have the power to change.

I saw a chart once that captured the opposite error, the utopian one. Human progress climbing, then a fork: one line spiking to paradise, one plunging to we-all-get-eaten-by-the-machine, and the only honest line, the long climb continuing, drawn faintest of all. Deutsch keeps two sentences in the same hand that kill both fake lines: problems are inevitable, and problems are soluble. The first kills the paradise spike, because there is never a final state where nothing is left to fix. The second kills the plunge, because no wall we are hitting now is permanent; it is knowledge we have not built yet. The pessimist’s error, in his reading, is parochial: he mistakes the edge of what we currently know for the edge of what can be done. The pie was never fixed. It has been getting bigger for the whole span we have kept records. I’ve made this case before, as a recession of progress: the climb is real, and what dipped is our nerve for it.

Or, belief in it.

You can watch the over-generalization fail in real time. A few years back a recession was treated as a near-certainty: a widely cited model put the odds at a near hundred percent, and the yield curve, which had called every downturn since the seventies, inverted and held. The plant-is-closing logic ran straight to its usual verdict. Batten down, the storm is here. The storm didn’t come. The economy grew near three percent, unemployment sat close to four, inflation drifted back downward, though still not to target. The losses underneath were real: prices hurt, rates hurt, whole sectors got ground down. The verdict built on top of them was wrong.

The proof is the neighbor

So what does the positive-sum world look like, past the slogan?

It looks like the floor falling. The floor under starting something. For most of history the tools that made a person productive belonged to whoever owned the factory, and the worker rented the loom. The electric motor sat available for forty years before it reshaped the shop floor, because using it meant rebuilding the whole plant around it, and only capital could do that. That is the honest worry, and I won’t wave it off: every general-purpose technology has promised to lift everyone and delivered, first, decades of its gains pooling at the top. There is even a name for the original case, the Engels pause. Through the early Industrial Revolution output per worker raced ahead while working wages crawled, for roughly fifty years, before the line finally bent.

So why might this time run differently? Because the thing that just got cheap is intelligence, and intelligence is the one asset the ordinary person already owns their slice of. The cost of wielding frontier capability has fallen something like fiftyfold a year; what cost sixty dollars to do in 2020 costs about a dime now. The complementary investment the old machines demanded, the factory, the mainframe, the back office, has shrunk to a laptop and a monthly bill smaller than a phone plan. You can see it in the count: Americans are filing new-business applications at nearly double the old rate, and the surge is almost all the one-person kind. The loom finally got cheap enough to own.

Degrowth and decline are the same animal in different coats.

I get a small, ground-level version of this every month. I spend something like twenty-five thousand dollars a year just to administer my business and sales taxes: the registering, the tracking, the filing across a thicket of thousands of jurisdictions no honest small operator can fully satisfy, all of it spent to comply before a dollar of it is the tax itself. It would be the easiest thing in the world to read that as proof the deck is stacked, and most weeks I do. But the same mess is also a list of things somebody could build a business fixing, and a few people already are.

The proof won’t be the billionaire on your algorithmically served headlines screen. It will be the neighbor down the street, the one who works a normal job and also, quietly, builds a thing that wasn’t there before and finds that the thing pays. The move that matters is small: from a little on the edge to genuinely, durably comfortable in terms of household cashflow. That is the reorientation the virus can’t stomach. It has to stop asking what it is owed and start asking what it could make that would add value. The economy exists to celebrate the people who create more value than they capture, who leave the world larger than they found it and take home a slice. The virus can’t even see them. It was built to count grievances, so it sees only billionaires hoarding, never builders enlarging, and the redistribution it reaches for fails for the reason Friedrich Hayek named: the knowledge of what is worth making is scattered across millions of heads on the ground, and never sits with the committee dividing the spoils.

Distribution is the only verb the virus knows. Creation is the verb that moved every line that ever rose.

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The exhortation has a shadow

And yet. I don’t want to wave away the part that’s tangible. The screws really are turning tighter on the middle. Things really do cost more, and the feeling of going backwards is its own kind of pain, separate from the hardship itself. The Engels pause was fifty years long, and if you tell the laborer the line eventually bends, he is right to spit at you. When I say the pie can grow, I am placing a bet, and the bet can lose: the gains can pool at the top again, the floor can fall for the person while the ceiling stays owned by the few who hold the compute. Pretending that can’t happen is its own small virus.

But notice what the smallness creed does with that real risk. It takes a genuine danger and runs it all the way to therefore stop building. That last step is the lie. You can hold the risk and refuse the surrender. That is just Fromm’s burden, picked up instead of set down: the freedom to act inside conditions you did not choose. Bearing it is harder than rationing. It is also the only move that has ever made the pie bigger for anyone. It is Rollo May’s joy derived from using one’s powers.

What’s missing, more than any policy, is the invitation. So let me make it, in whatever voice you would actually receive it in.

You are not living at the end of something. A free civilization is only ever the running total of the people who chose to build inside it, and the choosing is open again on terms that have never been this generous. The cost of learning to do almost anything has fallen through the floor, and the cost of starting almost anything has followed it down. None of that hands you an outcome. It hands you a door, and walking through it is still your work, which is the only part that was ever really yours. Alexis de Tocqueville caught the disposition in Americans two centuries ago: their question was the active one, what can I do, and the trying taught them the next thing. The pie is not fixed. It never was. The people who found that out did not wait to be handed a bigger slice. They went and made one, and the world was larger for it, and so were they.

So go build something. Try the thing, ship the thing, fix the broken thing nobody else will touch. Make more than you take. Do it long enough and the reward usually follows, but the reward was never the point. Creation fills; consumption drains. You build because it is the one act that leaves both the world and the builder larger than before. That’s the whole creed, and I’m betting my own week on it. Bet yours.

Sources and Inspiration

The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch

The Road to Serfdom - F.A. Hayek

The Harbinger Illusion

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:44:54 GMT

In 1942, the low point of the twentieth-century democratic retreat, a careful observer counting functioning democracies on the planet would have arrived at roughly twelve. Britain. Canada. Australia. Switzerland. Sweden. Ireland. The United States. New Zealand. Costa Rica. Uruguay. A handful of others, depending on how one defined the term and on which exiles in London still counted. Most of Europe was occupied or fascist. Most of Asia was imperial Japan or its colonies. Most of Latin America was caudillo or junta. The Soviet sphere was its own category of horror. Democracy as a form of government had been reduced to a perimeter, and a shrinking one at that, held primarily by the English-speaking peoples and a few neutrals.

By the early 2000s, the same observer would have counted roughly eighty-nine democracies, depending on the methodology. Five times as many. A clear trend. A vector. To anyone looking at that line and projecting forward, the conclusion looks obvious: democratic government is the form that history is moving toward. A harbinger. A direction. A consummation.

My friend and fellow podcast host, Sean, pushed back on me in a recent conversation. I had said that what we have here, citizens electing leaders, peaceful transfers of power, constraints on the strongest among us, is anti-historical. It is not the human pattern. He countered: why couldn’t the last 250 years and the global expansion of representative government be the new normal? Why couldn’t we read the trend forward?

I have been thinking about his question for some time now. The trend he’s pointing to, I believe, is not actually a trend. We Americans see the world from inside a bubble we did not build and cannot see the edges of. The expansion of democracy is downstream of one specific event, and the survival of any given democracy is downstream of forces that nearly didn’t operate. We are inside a survivorship lens. The view it gives us is not history. It is the photograph at the end of a war the photographer happened to win.

Karl Popper had a name for what my friend was doing. In 1945, sitting out the war in New Zealand and watching the most educated civilization in Europe devour itself, Popper wrote about a particular intellectual error he called historicism. The historicist treats current trends as laws of history rather than contingent outcomes. He sees a vector and assumes a destiny. He sees what is happening and deduces what must happen. The phrase Popper most worried about was “the right side of history,” because it converts a hope into a verdict and a verdict into a license.

The harbinger argument is the soft version of historicism. It claims only that we have enough evidence to forecast a continued expansion. The claim looks empirical. It is doing the same epistemological work Popper diagnosed: treating a contingent run as a law.

The contingent run starts in 1945. The global expansion of democracy after the Second World War happened for a specific reason. The United States, with British and Soviet help, won the largest shooting war in human history. Then, with the Soviets now its adversary, it held a security and nuclear umbrella over Europe and Japan for seventy-five years. Under that umbrella, defeated fascist states were rebuilt as democracies. Decolonizing nations were pulled toward the democratic side of a bipolar world. The 1989 collapse of the Soviet bloc was the second-order effect of the same victory.

*We have only ever seen democracy expand inside the perimeter of one country’s military and economic dominance.*

The harbinger argument also has a measurement problem. It conflates the existence of elections with the substance of constitutional self-government. The expansion of “representative government in some flavor” includes a great many regimes that are technically electoral and functionally authoritarian. Russia holds elections. Hungary holds elections. Turkey, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador all hold elections. Political scientists call this *competitive authoritarianism*. These regimes wear the costume of democracy while hollowing out its working parts: the independent judiciary, the free press, the constraints on the executive, the peaceful transfer of power. Freedom House has now registered twenty consecutive years of net global declines in liberty, beginning in 2005. V-Dem and Polity show similar patterns. The variable that matters is whether anything resists the winner. An election is easy to stage; a constraint on the winner is hard to fake.

If you look at that number, the count of regimes with functioning constraint on power, the curve has been bending the wrong direction for almost two decades. The harbinger may be pointing somewhere we did not expect.

There is a deeper problem with reading the trend forward. We are looking at the democracies that survived. The ones that didn’t survive are not in the chart.

Weimar Germany held elections. The Spanish Second Republic held elections. Chile under Allende held elections. Each of those societies, in its moment, considered itself a stable democratic order. Each had a constitution, a parliament, a free press, an electorate. Each fell. The pre-fascist Italian liberal state, the Argentine democracy of the 1920s, the Pakistani democracy of the 1950s, the Greek democracy of the 1960s, the Brazilian democracy of that same decade, the Turkish democracies of multiple eras, the Venezuelan democracy hollowed out from inside under Chávez: each of these felt permanent until the moment it was not. The base rate of failure for the experiment looks very different when you count the failed cases alongside the survivors.

Some of those failures the umbrella’s holder helped break. The hegemon that protected democracy in Western Europe also helped overthrow it in Santiago in 1973, in Brasília in 1964, in Athens in 1967. The umbrella was not always benevolent. That is part of the harbinger illusion too: assuming the host always plays the host.

And the survivors are younger than we remember. Spain and Portugal both lived under Catholic, corporatist, fascist-adjacent authoritarian regimes until the mid-1970s. Franco died in 1975. Salazar’s Estado Novo collapsed the year before. Greece’s military junta fell in 1974. The picture of a stable democratic Europe in which I grew up was, in those countries, freshly painted, barely a decade old when I was born.

Spain is now warming to Beijing, deepening ties, treating the relationship as one that could become permanent. Angela Merkel made the same move with Russia: Nord Stream, energy dependency, the partnership treated as a marriage. You can do business with an authoritarian regime. You can have a working relationship. There is no marriage there.

The elementary objection is that the United States is also entangled with China. Both economies depend on the other. The objection misses an asymmetry the Athenians named at Melos. In 416 BCE, when Athens demanded that the neutral island either join its alliance or be destroyed, the Athenians made their case: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Peers entangle and can exit. The weak get held. Spain tied to Beijing is Melos after the ships arrive.

The pattern is older still. The same Athens that demanded Melos submit was the original example of citizens governing themselves. It lasted roughly two centuries before its final extinction at the hands of Macedon. Inside its first century it nearly destroyed itself in the Peloponnesian War, which Thucydides described as a study in how confident, prosperous democracies dismantle their own deliberative capacity under stress. Word meanings shifted under factional pressure: “reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness.” That was 427 BCE.

*The mechanism by which faction corrupts the language a republic needs to govern itself is older than Christianity.*

The Roman Republic ran longer, almost five centuries, before collapsing into Caesarism inside a single generation’s lifetime. Older Romans alive at Augustus’s accession in 27 BCE could remember the Senate functioning. By the time Plutarch wrote about the collapse a century later, those eyewitnesses were gone. Each step had looked, at the time, like a reasonable response to crisis.

*It is more comfortable to believe we live inside a trend than that we live inside a window.*

Two thousand four hundred years of evidence make a case for something other than the harbinger. They make a case for fragility. Self-government is the historical exception. Every functioning democracy has existed inside a finite window of conditions. Every one has eventually faced the test of whether it could maintain itself. Most have failed. The ones that remain are the ones that, so far, have not.

The chart of expanding democracy shows something narrower than history bending toward freedom. It shows that for a brief period after a particular war, an unusually powerful country protected the conditions under which freedom could spread. We are in danger of confusing that period with a permanent feature of the human condition. The error runs deeper than the counting. It is psychological.

It would be easier to leave the argument here and blame the conditions. Lose the umbrella, lose the democracies. But Thucydides documented something the umbrella story cannot reach. Pericles, he wrote, “by his rank, ability, and known integrity, was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude — in short, to lead them instead of being led by them.” When Pericles died, his successors, “more on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude.”

Athens still had its institutions. What it lost was the kind of leadership that could contradict the demos, the citizen body, rather than flatter it. That loss is what made the Sicilian Expedition possible: the 415 BCE invasion the assembly approved against the cautious advice of its own generals, which two years later destroyed most of the Athenian army and navy in the harbor of Syracuse. That loss produced the oligarchic coup of 411 BCE, the assembly’s later execution of its own commanders after Arginusae in 406, and the surrender to Sparta in 404.

We cannot only blame the absence of an external umbrella. We also have to ask whether we still possess the internal practice, the leadership willing to contradict, the citizens willing to be contradicted, that maintains the experiment from inside.

When Sean asks why we cannot just project the expansion forward, the answer has several layers. The expansion is downstream of one war. The chart is missing the failures. The trend is already bending the other way on the variable that matters. And inside any given democracy, including ours, the question is whether the people inside the institutions still possess the practice that keeps the institutions alive.

The founders knew the experiment was fragile. Alexander Hamilton opened the Federalist Papers by asking whether human societies were “really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” He was not asking rhetorically. David McCullough closes his account of the year the Revolution nearly ended with the line that, to those who had lived through it, the outcome “seemed little short of a miracle.” That is the right frame for the inheritance. Not a trend. A miracle.

Confidence that it will obviously continue tells us nothing about whether it will. It is the luxury good that wealth and peace produce, and the first thing to go when they stop.

Treating the rare thing as normal is how it becomes rare again.

We are still inside the photograph. We have forgotten that it is one, and that the photographer could have lost.

Sources and Inspiration

History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides

1776 - David McCullough

The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

Math Be Damned

Daniel Hatke — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:35:58 GMT

This week, on Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, the ad-tech analyst Eric Seufert was defending advertising. His case, briefly: AI is about to flood the world with supply, so the scarce thing becomes matching, finding the person who wants this particular thing, and advertising is the matching machine. It works, he argued, because human wants are endlessly individual. Every person wants something a little different. Thompson named the failure mode of the opposite belief with an image: the gray Soviet apartment block.

It is what you build if you think demand is a lump you can satisfy by stamping out identical units. Identical paint, identical lives. The block is the future a few people produce when they cannot imagine anyone wanting something they have not already approved, and are handed the power to decide what everyone gets. Seufert drew a dagger of a statement. The people who would draw that block are brilliant, he said; the communist theorists always were. Underneath the brilliance is a contempt for the ordinary person and a failure to imagine he might want differently. The block is what you build when difference looks like a problem and sameness looks like a solution.

I have been turning the image over since, the way the tongue keeps returning to a chipped tooth. It sticks because no one in current political life will admit they want it. The de-growth conference attendee in Brussels does not want gray apartment blocks. The post-liberal Catholic intellectual in South Bend does not want them either. The Loudoun County resident voting against the next data center campus does not want them. The MAHA mom who pulled her kids off the vaccine schedule does not want them. The trad-wife with nine million TikTok followers, cooking marinara from scratch in a prairie dress, filmed on a phone that took a continent of rare earths and a thousand engineers to put in her hand, does not want them. None of them, asked directly, would say this is what I am for.

And yet the apartment block is what each of their prescriptions delivers when you follow the forecast to its end. The forecast is the policy. They get what they prognosticate. The mechanism that produces the block is the same mechanism in every case: the removal of human agency in favor of planned reduction, and the corresponding shrinkage of the cone of futures a society can build. The aesthetics differ. A canvas tote bag here, a barbell and raw eggs there, a chapel veil somewhere else. Underneath the aesthetics, one posture.

I want to draw a distinction that has been missing from this argument. Chosen reduction is a feature of abundance. Imposed reduction is its enemy. The kibbutz at dawn is chosen reduction. The Benedictine monastery is chosen reduction. The homestead with the garden and the woodstove and the chickens, when chosen against a backdrop where you do not have to homestead, is chosen reduction. None of these are gray apartment blocks. They are the freedom of an abundant civilization to opt out of a particular slice of itself, embedded inside an economy that funds and protects the choice. The kibbutz works because the country that contains it has Intel fabs.

Imposed reduction is the other thing. It is the urbanite blocking the data center or new rowhouse. It is the Vice President’s intellectual mentor proposing that the state should restrain consumer appetite for the citizens’ own moral formation. It is the Health Secretary pulling federal investment out of the platform that produced the COVID vaccines and adapting nothing to replace it. It is the legislature trying to make my neighbor’s wife unable to have a job she wants. The chosen reduction asks: what slice of this can I opt out of? The imposed reduction asks: what slice of this can I make unavailable to everyone?

Those are different questions. The civilization that runs the first one as a feature is the only kind of civilization that produces the surplus the second one tries to spend. Take the second posture as policy and within a generation you are also the civilization that has lost the surplus and the room for creativity and flourishing.

Borrowing the same poet

The first thing to notice about the people now arguing for imposed reduction is that the two largest schools of it, which understand themselves as enemies, are heirs to the same agrarian predecessor.

Jason Hickel is the LSE economic anthropologist whose Less Is More (2020) is the closest thing the contemporary de-growth movement has to a manifesto. Hickel wants a planned, democratic reduction in throughput in rich economies. Shorter working week, GDP cap, end planned obsolescence, scale down ecologically destructive sectors (SUVs, beef, fast fashion, arms, advertising), expand public provisioning. The kind of agrarian wholeness Hickel reaches for to ground the politics is the same one Wendell Berry spent a career defending, though Hickel arrives at it through planetary boundaries rather than through Berry himself.

Patrick Deneen is the Notre Dame political theorist whose Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023) made him the intellectual lodestar of a postliberal Catholic right that now reaches all the way to the Vice President. (Vance has publicly cited Deneen as formative; they shared a panel in 2023; Deneen treats the current administration as initiating a regime change he supports.) Deneen wants something he calls aristopopulism. A virtuous elite responsive to ordinary people’s longing for thicker social forms. Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars, he writes, first, the wholesale conquest of nature; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present; and third, an order that renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning. The agrarian wholeness Deneen reaches for to ground the politics is also Berry’s, and unlike Hickel, Deneen names and credits him outright.

One cites the poet, the other reinvents him. They are afraid of opposite things and prescribing the same answer.

This is structural fact, not rhetorical maneuver. The de-growth left and the postliberal Catholic right both inherit the relational ontology Wendell Berry spent a career articulating (health is membership, place as substrate, the integration of household and community and land and economy as one system) and convert it into prescription against an industrial civilization that has, in their account, severed the connections. They prescribe in opposite registers. Hickel prescribes from the EU Parliament, where in May 2023 Ursula von der Leyen opened a Beyond Growth conference attended by sixty partner organizations. Deneen prescribes through the Postliberal Order substack and the rotating bench of academics at First Things and Compact. Their shared substrate is a posture: less, want less, return.

Adrian Vermeule is the Harvard Law version of the same posture. In his 2020 Atlantic essay he wrote that subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being. The state as tutor. The citizens as subjects whose desires need correcting toward authenticity. That sentence is the philosophy of imposed reduction in its most candid form, and it comes from a tenured Harvard Law professor whose framework is being absorbed by the same intellectual ecosystem that produced the Vice President.

I want to mark how unusual the symmetry is. On the left I can produce the lecture-circuit anthropologist and the Brussels conference; on the right I can produce the Notre Dame professor and the Harvard Law theorist. Both sides have credentialed bench. Both sides have institutional anchoring. Both sides have major-party adjacency. And both sides arrive at the same direction of travel and the same agrarian conclusion, in different vocabularies: Deneen by naming Berry, Hickel by reinventing him.

The veto eats its own surplus

Thirty years ago Ashburn was farmland, its high school mocked by rivals as “Cornfield High.” Then America Online and the early internet exchanges came for the cheap land and the fiber, and the dairy farms became Data Center Alley. Today roughly seventy percent of the world’s internet traffic routes through Loudoun County, and Loudoun is the highest-income county in the United States. The two facts are related. Data centers now throw off about thirty-eight percent of the county’s general fund and close to half of its property tax, which has let Loudoun cut the residential rate every year for a decade, down to the lowest in Northern Virginia. The servers pay roughly twenty-six dollars in local tax for every dollar of public service they consume. The good schools, the parks, the low tax bill: that pleasant county is what the data centers bought.

In March of 2025 the Loudoun Board of Supervisors voted to make more of it harder to build, ending by-right data center development so every new project runs a gauntlet of neighborhood comment and hearings. Up the road in Prince William, the courts killed the Digital Gateway, which would have been the largest data center campus in the world. Nationally, local opposition has now stalled something like sixty-four billion dollars of announced construction.

The lead organizer in Prince William is a group called the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, and its executive director, Elena Schlossberg, is the most-quoted opposition voice in the regional press. The framing she reached for to describe what is being prevented: Who’s going to want to live in this dystopian hellscape with these behemoth buildings, and the constant noise, and then breathing in the diesel fumes?

Schlossberg is describing something, though less than the words carry. Stand at the fence line of a hyperscale campus and you get a continuous fan hum, on the order of living beside a highway that never goes quiet, and a hundred-acre box where a view used to be. That is a real cost, and it is the nearest neighbors who pay it. The diesel is mostly rhetoric: the backup generators run a handful of hours a year for testing, and data-center diesel is under four percent of Northern Virginia’s nitrogen-oxide emissions. The honest objection is narrow and local. The “dystopian hellscape” is doing more work than the decibel meter will support.

The trouble is what is being vetoed and what funds the veto. The Schlossberg sentence describes a place the speaker calls home in part because the previous generation of that infrastructure paid for the schools and the roads and the parks the current opposition uses.

Schlossberg as a person is beside the point. The structural fact sits at the center of every locally-imposed reduction. The veto consumes the surplus the previous expansion produced, and the people doing the vetoing live inside the surplus. The Loudoun resident who blocks the data center is opposing the next round of the economy that funded her standing to oppose it. That is the trouble with imposed reduction at the local scale. At the civilizational scale it is the same posture and the same trouble, just slower to notice.

Nobody checks the almonds

The other thing the data-center opposition runs on is a numeracy failure, and the failure is one of the cleanest examples of legible-cost-beats-illegible-gain I know of in current discourse.

The claim, recited in op-eds and timelines for two straight years now, is that a single ChatGPT query uses around 500 milliliters of water. Roughly a water bottle. Repeat the claim enough times and it does the work the citer wants it to do. The AI is consuming the planet to write a wedding toast. The number traces back to a 2023 paper by Shaolei Ren and colleagues at UC Riverside called Making AI Less Thirsty, which is a serious piece of work. Ren did not measure 500 milliliters per query. He measured roughly 500 milliliters per page-length response (a hundred-word email, in the Washington Post restatement), including both on-site cooling and off-site electricity-generation water, on a GPT-3 era model that predates the substantial efficiency gains in GPT-4o and beyond. The Sean Goedecke analysis of the original paper translates Ren’s actual measurement, corrected for both error and model efficiency, to roughly 5 milliliters per conversation. Closer to a teaspoon. The viral number is wrong by approximately 100 times, or 10,000%.

Set the corrected number against the rest of the water ledger. All U.S. datacenters combined consume about 17 billion gallons per year of direct on-site cooling water, per the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s 2024 datacenter energy and water report. Americans drink about 30 billion gallons of water per year. The entire on-site water footprint of every datacenter in the country is roughly half what we drink ourselves. California’s almond crop, by contrast, uses about 1.5 trillion gallons per year. Nearly 100 times more than every datacenter in the country combined. The California almond industry alone uses fifty times more water than every American drinks in a year.

I am not opposed to almonds. The point is the asymmetry, and it sharpens when you follow the water. The almond’s share is consumptive and then exported: transpired by the tree, embedded in the nut, and shipped abroad in the two-thirds of the crop that leaves the country. It is gone from the watershed for good. The datacenter’s consumptive water mostly evaporates from cooling towers and rejoins the hydrological cycle, and the cooling tower is the old design. The facilities now being proposed increasingly run closed-loop liquid cooling, which circulates the same water in sealed pipes and gives most of it back. A campus that would have evaporated five million gallons a day under the old design can run on the order of twenty thousand. The proposals getting vetoed are frequently the most water-efficient computing infrastructure ever built, killed by residents citing a per-query figure that is wrong by two orders of magnitude and an intuition about scale that is off by several more. The infrastructure carrying seventy percent of global internet traffic gets stopped under environmental framing while the infrastructure producing trail-mix gets a pass. McGilchrist’s hemispheric account illuminates here. The cost is legible: a measurable building, a measurable cooling tower, a number you can cite. The gain is illegible: the combinatorial value of meeting one more granular human need, which never arrives as a single number on a single page. The hemisphere that sees only the legible defaults, predictably, to reduction.

This is the discourse Hickel and Raworth feed and the discourse Schlossberg lives inside. None of them check the almonds. None of them check the joules. None of them check the flourishing we’ve all begun to take for granted, whereby software aids our lives, gives us back time, the only resource we cannot make more of.

The vote is not the decree

A fair objection is forming. The Loudoun veto was a democratic act. Residents organized, a zoning board elected by those residents deliberated, courts reviewed the result, and the whole thing can be reversed at the next election. Vermeule’s tutorial state and a federal rollback of the vaccine schedule are not that. They bind people who got no vote, at a scale no town meeting can reach, and they are far harder to undo. The cases are not equivalent in legitimacy, and I am not going to pretend they are.

The through-line is not the mechanism. It is the direction of the choice. Chosen reduction binds the chooser: I will live with less of this. Imposed reduction binds everyone else: you will live with less of this, because I have decided what you should want. A zoning veto, a tutorial statute, and a defunded vaccine platform sit at wildly different points on the legitimacy scale and run the identical move at the level of appetite. The appetite to make a slice of the available future unavailable to people who did not ask you to. That appetite wears a ballot in one place, a statute in another, and a theory of the state in a third. The legitimacy varies. The posture does not.

What Berry actually said

I want to honor what Berry actually said before I argue with the people who have taken him.

The exploiter-versus-nurturer passage in The Unsettling of America arrives in the opening chapter, after Berry has walked the reader through the deeper history of the conquest mentality. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, Berry writes, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. This is not a sociology of farmers and miners. It is a typology of orientation toward the world, available to anyone in any profession, including (this is the part the appropriators always skip) people who write code for a living and people who sell ads.

The substrate underneath the typology is what Berry called health is membership. The body and the household and the community and the land and the economy are not five separate categories addressed by five separate specialists. They are one system. A sick person discharged into a sick community living on sick land cannot be made well by a specialist who examines only the stomach. Berry traced health to the same Old English root that gave us heal, whole, and holy. The diagnosis follows: modern urban-industrial society is organized around radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth.

I read this and I feel what the post-liberal Catholics feel and what the de-growth left feels. The disconnection is real. The thinness of placeless prosperity is real. The way our prosperity has been organized around dissolving rather than thickening membership is real. I think every honest reader of Berry comes away with the suspicion that consumption is being substituted for meaning and that something necessary is being lost in the substitution.

What Berry did not do is conclude that membership was the prescription. He did not say that everyone should farm. He said that agrarian thinking — limits, care, the understanding that you live in a place and are answerable to it — was a necessary counterweight to industrial thinking. Counterweight, not replacement. The disposition Berry was defending was the disposition of the chosen kibbutz, the chosen monastery, the chosen homestead, the chosen practice of bringing the body and the household and the work back into one system because the doing of that work is good for the soul.

The freedom to live by Berry is the abundance Berry as policy would foreclose.

This is the move both poles miss. Hickel arrives at Berry’s disposition by another road and produces a planetary policy for reducing what we are allowed to want. Deneen reads Berry outright and produces a theology in which the state’s job is to constrain the appetite of the citizenry until the citizenry forms more authentic desires, authentic by his standards. Both prescriptions take the disposition Berry defended and convert it into something it was never meant to be: a universal mandate. Take Berry as policy and within a generation we are not weighing the soul-cost of placeless prosperity from the comfortable position of weighing it. We are having six children so the farm has labor, and we are burying three of them before they reach reproductive age, and we have lost the surplus that funds the chapel and the library and the hospital where the surviving three would otherwise read Berry. The agrarian whose work I, someone named after the patron saint of farmers, am reading from a heated room in Colorado existed inside, and was funded by, the very modernity he was diagnosing. I am making this case from that same heated room, having done exactly none of the homesteading I am so generously permitting everyone else to choose. The diagnosis is the gift abundance produces.

A civilization can build the kibbutz. It cannot mandate the kibbutz. The mandate is the apartment block.

Neither pole will count the joules

The deepest fact about the present de-growth argument, on left and right, is that neither side will sit down and do Vaclav Smil’s arithmetic.

Smil is the energy-and-materials historian whose How the World Really Works is the closest thing modern civilization has to a parts manifest and flow chart. Modern life rests on four material pillars: ammonia, plastics, steel, and cement. We make all four by combusting fossil carbon at scale. The synthetic ammonia produced by the Haber-Bosch process is the foundation of modern nitrogen fertilizer, and roughly half the nitrogen in your body was wrung from the air in a Haber-Bosch plant before it became your blood. Smil’s specific number is that in 2020 about four billion people would not have been alive without it. Not better off. Not richer. Alive. Modern food production is materially a process by which a kilogram of bread is also approximately two hundred fifty milliliters of diesel-fuel-equivalent embedded along the supply chain. The four pillars do not have near-term substitutes at scale. Energy transitions take generations. This is the geophysics underneath every conversation about reduction.

Hickel’s strongest hand is the decoupling math, and it is a real one: in Vogel and Hickel’s 2023 Lancet Planetary Health paper, eleven high-income countries need more than two hundred and twenty years to reach a 95 percent emissions reduction at current decoupling rates, against the ten to twenty-five years Paris compliance requires. Grant it in full. Then watch what he does with it. Less Is More discusses agriculture in terms of agroecology and reduced beef. He does not engage Smil. He does not name Haber-Bosch. He does not address the nitrogen-fixation arithmetic that says half the population of his planet is downstream of synthetic ammonia. Raworth’s Doughnut Economics cites planetary boundaries, including the nitrogen cycle, as ceilings to stay under. She treats them as ceilings, not as the inputs the survival of the people currently alive runs through. Both ducked the question.

Deneen and Vermeule and Ahmari duck it too. Their critique is moral and anthropological. Their limits are theological-natural-law limits on appetite, not biophysical limits on throughput. They tell you appetite is insatiable; they do not tell you a kilowatt-hour costs X joules of primary energy and that the cement and steel and ammonia and plastic of the small-batch artisanal household economy they want to restore cannot be produced at the scale that household economy requires without exactly the industrial substrate they are diagnosing. The reduction is prescribed as virtue. The arithmetic of what it would actually take to live the reduced life at three hundred thirty million people is not performed.

You can dispute Smil’s policy preferences without disputing his accounting. The accounting is what neither pole will sit down with. Both poles share the posture of reduction and refuse the question that would decide it. Bring Smil to a Beyond Growth conference and Bring Smil to a Postliberal Order panel and watch the same thing happen at both events: a polite acknowledgment, a quick pivot, a return to the moral grandstanding that does not need to count.

Math be damned.

This is the structural feature of imposed reduction as a policy posture. It has to refuse the accounting, because the accounting is what tells you what the reduction costs. The chosen reduction inside an abundant civilization does not need to do the accounting, because the abundance is already doing it. The kibbutz at dawn does not need to defend its agronomy at planetary scale; it can be a kibbutz because the surrounding country can be Israel. The Benedictine monastery does not need to defend its libraries on a thermodynamic budget; it can be a monastery because the surrounding civilization can be Europe. The homestead does not need to demonstrate that home-canned tomatoes are a national food strategy; it can be a homestead because Loudoun County can also host the datacenters that route the homesteader’s grocery delivery when the canning fails.

Imposed reduction at the civilizational scale is the posture that wants the monastery without the surrounding Europe.

You cannot plan the bottom either

James C. Scott is instrumental here. Premodern states, in a phrase Scott borrows from Charles Lindblom, were all thumbs and no fingers. They could crush but they could not finely manipulate, because they could not see their own terrain in detail. The modern state grew fingers by making the terrain legible. The land registry, the grid, the cadastral map, the standardized commodity, the scheduled vaccination. These are the things the planner can plan with. What the state cannot see, Scott called mētis: the practical, embodied, local knowledge that lives in the people doing the actual work and that no central planner ever fully holds. The grid is necessary for the state to act. The grid also destroys what the grid cannot see.

That state is the apartment block, the decreed preferences from on high. Mētis is the streets of London, the leaning buildings of the Black Forest, the meandering paths between rice paddies in Vietnam.

Friedrich Hayek had said the same thing forty years earlier in a different register. Dispersed knowledge cannot be centralized. The planner does not know enough to plan production, because the relevant knowledge (what this customer needs today, what this craftsman can build this week, what this farmer’s south field can grow this year) is distributed across millions of minds and cannot be made legible to any one of them at the center.

I made the production half of this argument in The Seduction of Control: dispersed knowledge defeats the planner who wants to optimize output. What is less often noticed is that the same argument runs in reverse. You cannot plan the bottom either. The planner who wants to engineer a reduction is using the same legibility-grid as the planner who wanted to engineer the optimal output, and the grid sees the same things: the measurable cost of the datacenter, the measurable carbon of the SUV, the measurable transgression of the vaccination schedule, the measurable disconnection of the household from the soil. What the grid does not see is the combinatorial value the next datacenter would have unlocked. The grandmother whose mRNA cancer vaccine kept her alive long enough to read a story to her grandchild. The marriage that worked because both spouses had careers or lifestyles they chose. The thirty million people whose nitrogen was fixed by Haber-Bosch into the protein on their plates this week.

The de-growth planner and the postliberal-restoration planner are running the same epistemic operation as the central-production planner. They have all decided what the citizens really need (or are allowed to want, or should be made to want) on the basis of what the grid can see. The mētis they are destroying is the distributed knowledge of three hundred thirty million people working out, for themselves, in the granular volatility of daily life, what slice of an abundant civilization they want to live inside. That distributed working-out is the engine. Flatten the signal and you lose the gain.

This is the difference between the kibbutz at dawn and the Brussels conference. The kibbutz is one expression of the mētis. The conference is the legibility-grid arriving to teach the mētis what it should have wanted. Karl Popper’s historicism applied.

There is a way of thinking about civilizational growth that I keep returning to. David Deutsch’s principle, developed across The Beginning of Infinity, is that pessimism is parochial and optimism is empirical. The empirical record of the last two hundred years is a hockey stick of human flourishing. Child mortality down by an order of magnitude. Literacy up across every continent. The chance of a violent death down by every available measure. The absolute number of people in extreme poverty falling for the first time in human history during a period when the population quadrupled. Hans Rosling spent three decades demonstrating that the educated default is to be wrong toward the dark. We expect the world to be worse than it is, in a one-directional way, and we expect it to be getting worse when it is mostly getting better. Rosling’s word for what is left after you have refused both the optimistic and the pessimistic consolation is possibilist. The work is to hold the level (still bad) and the direction (mostly better) together without flinching toward either.

The mechanism behind the hockey stick has a name. Hayek called it catallaxy: the spontaneous order that arises when countless people trade and specialize with no one directing the whole. What Matt Ridley calls ideas having sex: old concepts meeting and breeding new ones. What Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible: the next step that becomes reachable only once the last one has been built. People trade. They specialize. They recombine. The recombination is combinatorial. The granular need meeting the granular product is the granular discovery. None of the individual recombinations are visible to a planner before they happen. Most of them are small. A few of them are an mRNA platform built over a decade of cancer-vaccine research, then adapted from the published SARS-CoV-2 sequence to a working vaccine inside a single year. The recombination requires the volatility, because the volatility is the search. You cannot smooth out the peaks and valleys and keep the gain. The peaks and the valleys are the gain.

This is the posture I want to call for. Possibilism leaning towards optimism, embrace the volatility. Not blind, nor cynical. The posture is closer to Rosling’s possibilism crossed with Deutsch’s principle that all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. Sit with the data. Hold the level and the direction. Refuse the cheap pessimism that thinks the bottom is moral. Refuse the cheap optimism that thinks everything will work out. Pay attention to what the recombination is actually producing. Better humans. Healthier ones. More of them. More thoughts than anyone could file. Consciousness, piling up in adundance. Notice that none of it was planned and none of it could have been.

The chosen reduction can be a feature of this. The opt-in monastery, the opt-in farm, the opt-in week without a phone, the opt-in life closer to the kind of work Berry wanted to defend. Each of these is a way to take the abundance and choose what to do with it, including choosing less of part of it. We need the freedom to choose Berry. We need other people to choose differently. The mētis is the differing.

I started with the Soviet apartment block because of who is unwilling to claim it. Hickel does not want the block. Deneen does not want the block. Schlossberg does not want the block. The Health Secretary does not want the block. The trad-wife with nine million followers does not want the block. They each want some particular slice of a less-this future. A regulated SUV. A restored household. A vetoed datacenter. A vaccine schedule shortened. None of these is the apartment block. The apartment block is what they each produce when their prescriptions reach scale.

The forecast is the policy. They get what they prognosticate. The mechanism is the same in every case: an authority who has decided what the citizens really need uses the legibility-grid to remove what does not fit the picture. The grid removes the apartment buildings the city should have built, because they spoil the rural character of a place that is funded by the data infrastructure of every city. The grid removes the mRNA platform that produces the next pandemic vaccine, because the platform is novel and the limits of human appetite are ancient. The grid removes the wife’s career, because the household is the foundation. The grid removes the data center, because the diesel fumes are visible and the seventy percent of global internet traffic is not. Each removal is a sliver. Stack the slivers and you have something more Soviet.

Chosen reduction is a feature of abundance. Imposed reduction is its enemy.

I want one more thing to land. The Berry critique is real. The post-liberal critique is partly real. The de-growth empirical hand on decoupling is partly real. The Loudoun resident’s love of place is entirely real. None of this implies the prescription that follows. That is the move the entire argument hinges on. You can take the diagnosis seriously and refuse the policy. You can hold what Berry saw without believing what Hickel proposes or what Deneen wants the state to enforce. The diagnosis is downstream of an abundant civilization examining its own discontents. The prescription, if it becomes policy, kills the civilization in which the diagnosis was possible.

What we should be defending is the volatile, distributed, peaks-and-valleys regime that produces the recombination. The mētis, the catallaxy, the adjacent possible, the idea sex, the next datacenter and the next vaccine and the next mode of household and the next way of being a wife and the next way of being a man. The freedom to opt out of any particular slice of it into the kibbutz or the monastery or the homestead while leaving the surrounding country intact for the people who are still choosing differently. The civilization that runs this regime is the one that produced Wendell Berry. It is also the only kind of civilization that could read him, or would be allowed to!

The bottom that the prescriptionists forecast is the bottom their prescriptions build. Erich Fromm named the deeper pull eighty years ago: freedom is a burden, and the reduction promises relief from the burden of choosing. They do not have to want the block. They want the relief, and the block is what relief costs at scale. They will deliver it if we let them.

I would rather pay the cost of staying inside the volatility. I keep returning to the reframe of Icarus I borrowed in Our Recession of Progress: the lesson is not to fly lower, but to build better wings. The peaks hurt sometimes. The valleys hurt more. The civilization that holds them together is also the one that fixes nitrogen for four billion people, keeps Schlossberg’s neighborhood lit, runs the mRNA platform the Health Secretary just defunded, and leaves room for someone who wants to be a monk to go be a monk and someone who wants to keep eight children and a sourdough starter to be a homesteader and someone who wants to write essays from a heated room in Colorado to do that too. The peaks and valleys are the price of the surplus, and the surplus is the price of all the differing.

We get to keep the kibbutz at dawn. We do not get to mandate it. The Soviet block at the end of the prescription is what the mandate builds.

Sources and Inspiration

The Unsettling of America - Wendell Berry

How the World Really Works - Vaclav Smil

Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott

The Road to Serfdom - F.A. Hayek

The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch

Factfulness - Hans Rosling

The Master and His Emissary - Iain McGilchrist

Less Is More - Jason Hickel

Why Liberalism Failed - Patrick Deneen

Our Recession of Progress

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:47:04 GMT

On March 22, 1997, Stanley Kubrick accepted the Directors Guild’s D.W. Griffith Award by video. He sent a film recorded at his home in England, where he was deep in Eyes Wide Shut production and unwilling to interrupt it. He died two years later, and the speech became one of his last recorded statements about the craft.

He used it to highlight an old uncertainty.

He was telling the story of D.W. Griffith, the early-cinema giant whose career ended in shunning after a decade of soaring fame. Kubrick described the arc as Icarus and his wax wings. Then he told us what he had never been able to settle in his own mind:

“I’ve compared Griffith’s career to the Icarus myth, but at the same time I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘Don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as, ‘Forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.’”

Two readings of the same story. We have been raised on the first. The second is the reading this publication is named after.

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
— Edith Wharton

The other lesson of Icarus

The standard reading punishes Icarus for ambition. Don’t fly too close to the sun. Don’t rise above your station. The myth becomes a parable of humility, and humility, in this telling, means staying low. More don’t than do.

Tall poppy syndrome in myth form.

Kubrick saw something else inside the same story. Daedalus warned his son about the sun because Daedalus knew the wings had a known weakness. He had built them himself, in a prison on Crete, with wax that could not hold heat.

The wax was the problem. The flight only made it visible.

Different question. The standard reader hears the myth and asks, “How do I keep from flying too high?” The Kubrick reader hears the same myth and asks, “What would it take to build wings that don’t melt?” The first question paralyzes. The second does work.

It expands the plane of possibility.

Alexis de Tocqueville named the same disposition in 1840, and he named it as the American one. Walking through Jacksonian villages, he watched citizens treat inherited tradition as information rather than authority and he watched citizens solve practical difficulties without waiting for permission. They got on with it.

He wrote it down: “Each American calls only on the individual effort of his reason.” A few lines later: “everything in the world is explicable... nothing exceeds the bounds of intelligence.”

That second sentence is almost two centuries old, and it is a description of what Kubrick was pointing at. The engineer’s posture is older than Silicon Valley by two hundred years. Tinker, try, discover the failure mode, build the next version. Tocqueville was describing American village life when he wrote it. He could have been describing the first lab to build an antibiotic, the first crew to land a reusable rocket, the first team that taught a model to write its own evaluations.

There is a cost to this disposition. It is the burden of being responsible for outcomes. You take the engineer’s posture seriously and you no longer get to point at the heavens when things break. The wax was your problem; the wings were yours to build.

But Icarus did die. The wax did melt. The cautionary reading is grounded in a real event, and Daedalus’s warning to his son was correct.

The engineer’s reading has to be honest about what it absorbs. Kubrick never said the wings have no failure modes. He named what the failure mode was, and he asked what the response should be. What should this relationship be? How do we orient with our world? The cautionary reader hears “the wax melts” and concludes: don’t fly. The engineering reader hears the same sentence and concludes: don’t use wax. Both agree on the diagnosis. They diverge on the prescription.

The cautionary prescription costs almost nothing. It requires no skill, no apprenticeship, no exposure to consequence, no attempts that may lead to public failure. You can sit out the entire experiment and still tell yourself you were wise. The engineering prescription is expensive. It requires you to learn metallurgy. You have to test the wings in conditions you have not yet faced. Sometimes you lose someone during the testing.

Restraint is cheap. Engineering is expensive.

This is why the standard reading appeals so persistently. It flatters the modesty of the listener while excusing the work of the engineer.

The same disposition operates at the civic scale. The American republic’s self-correcting capacity has always belonged to citizens who refused to wait for the system to fix itself. Frederick Douglass treating the Constitution as a glorious liberty document despite its writers’ hypocrisy. The suffragists building seven decades of voluntary association into the Nineteenth Amendment. The marchers in Birmingham using the framework’s stated principles against its practiced failures.

That work is the engineer’s posture applied to moral substrate. The framework was inherited with known failure modes. The cautionary reader surveyed those failures and concluded the framework was unworthy. The engineering reader looked at the same failures and asked what would have to be built to address them. The handholds were the answer in every case.

Citizens build moral substrate by extracting promises from frameworks that resist. Engineers build technical substrate by extracting capacity from materials that resist. Both work on the next version. Both refuse to let the failure mode become the verdict.

Recession of progress

There is a useful word for what happens when fear spreads through a system. Economists call it a recession. Someone loses their job, gets cautious, stops spending. Businesses earn less, get cautious, stop hiring. More people lose their jobs. Fear feeds on fear, and the only thing that interrupts the cycle is a deliberate injection of activity — stimulus — into durable parts of the economy.

We are in a recession of progress.

A wide segment of the country has adopted the cautionary reading as a default. They will not bet themselves on advancement. They will not stake reputation, identity, or effort on anything that requires building. Martin Gurri, a CIA analyst who studied how networked publics topple authority without constructing alternatives, called this pattern negation without construction at the political scale. The reasonable-sounding caution becomes the cultural baseline, which lowers the cost of joining it, which raises the cost of dissenting from it, which produces more caution. The cycle works the same way the economic one does. Nothing breaks it except people who step into the engineer’s posture deliberately, knowing the prevailing current is against them.

That is the stimulus this recession needs. Not a policy. People.

David Deutsch, the Oxford physicist who is Karl Popper’s most direct intellectual heir that has entered my life, has a phrase for the reading we were taught. He calls it bad philosophy. Bad philosophy, in Deutsch’s sense, denies “the possibility, desirability, or existence of progress.” It is the kind of thinking that makes problems seem unsolvable by design.

The cautionary Icarus reading is bad philosophy in exactly this sense. It denies the possibility of better wings. It treats Daedalus as a hubristic father rather than a craftsman with a known engineering tolerance. It treats the wax as the final word.

Deutsch writes: “Only progress is sustainable.” The triumphs are always temporary. The current generation of antibiotics is always temporary. The current solution is always going to give way to a different problem, which will require a different solution. Freezing where we are produces only the road back to Easter Island, where every static civilization has eventually arrived. The Easter Islanders survived by extinguishing the creativity of their members until the civilization itself collapsed under a problem its surviving members were no longer equipped to solve.

The substrate-upgrade arc is visible in the small lights. Our species spent a million years with fire on sticks. Then candles. Then oil lamps. Then kerosene. Then electricity. Then fission. Each rung was someone refusing to let the previous rung become the verdict. Each rung was an engineering decision to do a better job on the wings.

The lamp in your kitchen is the great-great-grandchild of a feather and a piece of wax that melted somewhere over the Aegean.

The disposition is what compounds. The bad-philosophy reader would have stopped at the stick. The engineering reader is the reason you can read this in your house at night.

The live test

This brings us to where we are.

The most consequential technological development of any of our lifetimes is unfolding now, and the question being asked of every adult in the room is the question Kubrick named. Two readings of Icarus. Which one will you live by?

The cautionary camp is real and not foolish. There are serious failure modes in what is being built. Misalignment. Deployment without sufficient understanding. Concentration of capability in fewer and fewer hands. The displacement of human capacities we do not yet know we needed. The people naming these risks include sober minds across the political spectrum. Some on the left argue that misalignment risks outpace safety research. Some on the right argue that outsourcing thought to machines hollows out the human capacities institutions depend on. The cautionary disposition crosses tribes because its source is psychological rather than ideological.

The engineering camp is also real and crosses tribes. They see the same failure modes. They are doing the alignment work, the interpretability work, the institutional design, the governance experiments. They are testing the wings before they ship them. They are the reason any of these risks are being addressed at all. The cautionary camp’s prescription is “don’t build,” and it was never going to hold against a technology this useful. The real question was whether the building would be undisciplined or disciplined.

The substrate-upgrades that built modernity happened under genuine uncertainty, with real costs, by people who saw the costs and built anyway.

In 1942, Edward Teller raised the possibility that an atomic detonation could ignite the atmosphere. Hans Bethe ran the calculations and concluded the probability was vanishingly small. It was not zero. The Trinity team built the bomb anyway, under wartime duress, knowing what the weapon would do to Hiroshima and Nagasaki even if the calculations were right. They were Daedalus watching the wax, flying anyway because Hitler was racing them.

The printing press is older but the structure is identical. Gutenberg cast movable type in the 1450s, and within two generations Europe was at war over what could be printed. The religious wars that killed roughly a third of Central Europe were downstream of an engineering decision that ended the Catholic Church’s monopoly on the construction of meaning. The press got built. It also broke the previous order. The Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and three centuries of democratic experiments are impossible without it. The substrate-upgrade was worth the cost.

The internet is the version we are still inside. We have not landed the protocols. The cycles are faster, the local culture is thinner, the information environment is more fragmented. The cautionary reading wants to legislate this back to 1990. The engineering reading says we built it, we are inside it, and the work now is figuring out how to live well with the substrate we have chosen.

I have made my choice. I do not believe the failure modes are arguments against the project. I believe they are the engineering specification. The wax melts. We know it melts. The wings are being built with that knowledge by people who have read Daedalus and decided he was an engineer giving an engineering warning.

That is the Promethean reading.

Prometheus stole fire and chose the chains. Daedalus built the wings and chose the flight.

The engineer who gives humanity capability and the engineer who uses it are two generations of the same myth-family. The publication is named after the first because the disposition is older than any one application of it.

The engineering disposition is harder than the cautionary one. It implicates you. You cannot stand outside the project and watch the failures with detachment if you have accepted the engineering reading. You become responsible for what gets built and how. You lose the consolation of having played Chicken Little.

That is the price of the better wings. It is a price worth paying, because the alternative is the static condition that has destroyed every civilization that adopted it. We have built better wings before. We are nothing if not Icarus himself, and Icarus, read correctly, is the patron saint of every advance our species has earned.

The wax melts. Build the next pair anyway.

Sources and Inspiration

The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch

The Revolt of the Public - Martin Gurri

The Farm in Braintree

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:38:04 GMT

At three in the morning on June 17, 1775, cannon fire woke Abigail Adams and her four children. After sunrise she climbed Penn’s Hill with her seven-year-old son, John Quincy, and watched smoke rise from the Battle of Bunker Hill across the harbor. The British were burning Charlestown. The cannons were close enough to rattle the windows. Her husband was in Philadelphia, doing work that would get him hanged if it failed. Dr. Joseph Warren, a close family friend, would not survive the day.

She walked back down the hill and tended the farm.

In the days that followed she taught John Quincy a verse from William Collins’s 1746 “Ode,” a memorial to the dead, and had him recite it every morning after the Lord’s Prayer for the rest of the war: By fairy bands their knell is rung / By forms unseen their Dirge is sung / [There] Honour comes a pilgrim grey / To Bless the turf that wraps their Clay. John Quincy wrote decades later about “the tears of my mother and mingled with them my own, at the fall of Warren.” The poem Abigail chose was written for English soldiers who died putting down the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. She never considered herself an insurgent. She thought she was defending something that already belonged to her.

Abigail Adams held no office, signed no declaration, sat in no Continental Congress. She couldn’t. Women in colonial Massachusetts couldn’t vote, couldn’t hold property in their own name once married (the doctrine was called coverture), couldn’t attend university.

While John was away in Philadelphia building a nation he might not survive to see, Abigail ran a farm through wartime scarcity. She educated four children largely on her own. She absorbed refugees and family fleeing the siege of Boston. She watched wartime inflation triple the price of pins, ordered a chest shipped home from Philadelphia, and planned to resell at the rising rate. She wrote to him: “I hope in time to have the reputation of being as good a farmeress as my partner has of being a good statesman.” She called herself the directress of their husbandry.

The pin episode was the smallest version of a practice that would run for forty years. Beginning in 1777, with the Continental economy collapsing under wartime inflation, Abigail began converting cash into government bonds through her uncle Cotton Tufts, who kept the holdings legally separate from John’s. Continental loan office certificates at 6% during the war. Deeply discounted Massachusetts Consolidated Notes in the 1780s that paid out at 18% effective interest. Federal bonds under Hamilton’s funding plan in the 1790s. Military bonds funding John’s buildup against France in 1798. She called the money my own pocket money, and my pin money, and finally this Money which I call mine. John bought land and feared debt. Abigail bought paper and embraced calculated risk. Most of the Adams family wealth came from these securities. Much of it was bought without John’s full knowledge. She financed Peacefield, the family estate at Quincy, with the proceeds.

She read every pamphlet she could get her hands on. When Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appeared in January 1776, she read it almost immediately. “Tis highly prized here,” she told John, “and carries conviction whereever it is read. I have spread it as much as it lay in my power.” John was ambivalent. He admired Paine’s style and distrusted his radical democracy, and wrote his own competing pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, to argue for stronger restraints. Abigail kept distributing Paine.

In the summer of 1776, with smallpox sweeping through Boston, she organized a party of seventeen (her sisters’ families, her uncle’s family, all four of her children) and rode into the city to be inoculated. Inoculation killed people. Her mother had forbidden it for twelve years. Her mother was dead now. She weighed the odds, decided, and acted. Our Little ones, she reported to John, stood the opperation Manfully. Her two youngest didn’t take on the first try. They had to be reinoculated. The doctors weren’t sure it would work. John wasn’t there to consult.

On July 18, 1776, while she was inoculated and contagious, she walked into King Street to hear the Declaration of Independence read aloud from the State House balcony. She wrote John about what she saw: the kings arms were taken down from the State House and every vestage of him from every place in which it appeard and burnt in King Street. Thus ends royall Authority in this State. Her two youngest waited back at her uncle’s house. The doctors still didn’t know.

She signed her letters “Portia,” borrowing a Roman republican name to give herself a civic identity the public record refused her. Those letters were strategic intelligence: the mood of the colonies, observations about loyalty and dissent, assessments that John couldn’t access from a deliberation room in Philadelphia. John himself attested it: I think you shine as a stateswoman of late, as well as a farmeress.

In March 1776, just after the British evacuated Boston, she wrote him from a place of rare elation: I feel a gaieti de Coar to which before I was a stranger. I think the Sun looks brighter, the Birds sing more melodiously, and Nature puts on a more chearfull countanance. Riding that new sense of possibility, she added in the same letter the line history would remember. It reads now like a proto-feminist plea. The actual structure was Lockean: she was extending the Revolutionary principle of consent to the marital relation. Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. No taxation without representation, said by the colonies to England. No laws without voice, said by Abigail to her husband. The same argument scaled down to the household. She was warning John what the revolution would need to become if it wanted to survive its own contradictions. In the same letter, she named the deeper hypocrisy: the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs.

Abigail, you are my patriot.

John’s reply was jocular: the despotism of the petticoat, the assurance that men knew better than to repeal their masculine systems. The marital register softened the form. The substance was a political dodge. He agreed. But he couldn’t spend his coalition capital on it. Not yet. In the same letter, he conceded as much: We have only the name of masters. He knew the system he was mock-defending was already a fiction. He was mocking the status quo, not Abigail. Over the years, society would move, his own power would move, and many of her positions would land where she had said they belonged. Others took decades more. Theirs was the most consequential intellectual partnership of the founding, and Abigail was the upstream cause of John’s evolution. She kept writing because she had a reader who listened to her. She saw the gaps between what the founders declared and what they practiced. She named them, in letters that weren’t meant for publication, to a man she trusted.

History knows her name. But it knows her as John’s wife, as the woman who wrote “Remember the Ladies,” as a supporting character in someone else’s story. The actual scope of what she did, the strategic weight she carried, sits quietly behind the more celebrated narrative. I don’t think she minded. She wanted the work to land, and history has supported her.

When the correction becomes the point

This is harder to talk about than it should be.

The modern instinct around equality and gender treats visibility as the measure of contribution. If you aren’t seen, you didn’t matter. If your name isn’t on it, you didn’t build it. The culture measures impact by how loudly it’s announced.

I understand the impulse. History has been genuinely unfair about whose names it remembers. It has also been unfair about whom it tried to abolish or rewrite. Women especially have been written out of stories they helped author.

John bought land and feared debt. Abigail bought paper and embraced calculated risk.

Abigail’s version of the demand was different. “Remember the Ladies” was a demand for legal standing — for inclusion in the architecture, for protection in the law. Not personal visibility, not credit on the marquee. She wanted women to be heard in the framework, not famous outside of it. That distinction, between equal opportunity to act and equal recognition for the acting, has gotten harder to hold.

But watch what happens when the correction becomes the point. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin called these pseudo-events: gatherings staged to look correct rather than to be correct. The image is the deed. Meetings multiply. Announcements replace action.

We’ve all done it. Spent energy making sure the right people knew about our work rather than spending that energy on the work itself. The culture encourages it on every side. Celebrate yourself. Build your brand. Make sure they see you. Or on the other pole: post the right dissent, signal the right credentials, perform your tribe. Different costumes, identical move: the display becomes the deed. The authenticity market sells you the signals.

The demand for equal visibility isn’t the same as the demand for equal opportunity. Abigail Adams had brutally unequal opportunity. She couldn’t vote, couldn’t own property independently, couldn’t sit in the rooms where decisions were made. And yet she exercised more influence on the founding than some of the men who signed the Declaration. She didn’t wait for the system to recognize her.

She was too busy being effective.

The architecture nobody names

For every name history keeps, hundreds made that keeping possible. Washington needed the farmers who fed his army through Valley Forge. Jefferson needed the printers and riders who carried the Declaration from parchment to public consciousness. Adams needed Abigail.

The founding was fragile. Improvised by flawed people with no blueprint and no certainty. And it held not because of the celebrated names but because of the invisible architecture behind them: the people who grew the food, managed the money, raised the next generation, and kept the civic organism functioning while the famous figures did the parts history would remember.

Tocqueville saw this when he traveled America fifty years later. What struck him was the voluntary associations: ordinary people joining together to build schools, churches, roads, civic organizations, anything that needed building. Nobody wrote about these people. They didn’t have bylines or legacies or platforms. But the democracy worked because of them. The habits that sustained self-governance were practiced quietly, daily, by people who showed up because the work needed doing.

The township, Tocqueville thought, was to freedom what primary schools are to science: the place where citizens first learn the habit of governing themselves. Not the Senate chamber. The township. Where people solved problems without waiting for instructions, built things that would outlast them without anyone recording their names.

The actual scope of what she did, the strategic weight she carried, sits quietly behind the more celebrated narrative.

Aristotle saw this before Tocqueville did. Friendship seems to be the bond of Social Communities, and legislators seem to be more anxious to secure it than Justice even. Abigail had named the same move at household scale. Such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. The political community rests on more than the rules. It rests on the relational substrate beneath them. The framework holds because the substrate holds.

We don’t build monuments to this architecture. Everything we have rests on it.

Emerson called it the iron string: the willingness to trust your own capacity without waiting for the world to confirm it. The pressure of society, Emerson saw, conspires against the independence of every one of its members. The pressure runs toward conformity, toward measuring yourself by whether others noticed, toward substituting the room’s approval for your own judgment.

Abigail vibrated to her own iron string. She didn’t need the world to write her name in order to exercise her mind. She wasn’t waiting for the monument. She was raising a future president, advising a current one, and holding together a farm in Braintree while her world burned.

That’s a kind of power we don’t celebrate well anymore. We celebrate the person who demands the stage. The voice that says I deserve to be seen. And there is a version of that which is righteous, which corrects real injustice, which names what should have been named long ago.

Most of the Adams family wealth came from these securities. Much of it was bought without John’s full knowledge.

But there’s another version that confuses the stage with the work. That treats the recognition as the goal rather than the byproduct. That spends so much energy making sure the contribution is visible that the contribution itself gets thinner.

The person doing the most is usually the one least concerned with whether anyone notices. And the person most concerned with being noticed is usually not the one you’d want running things.

A letter to my daughter

Underneath my cultural diagnosis is something more specific.

I have a daughter.

What I want to tell her is not to focus too tightly on demanding your seat at the table. The seat matters less than what you do once you’re in it. And sometimes what you do outside the room matters more than anything happening inside.

You have special and immense powers. I can see them already. What I want for you is to use them. Fully, without apology, without waiting for permission, without needing the byline to know the work was yours. Let them land where they need to land. Push the history of the people around you in a direction worth pushing. The world you’ll inherit makes Abigail’s path harder, not easier. The absence of constraint can be its own confusion.

The credit will sometimes go elsewhere. The history books may remember someone else’s name.

Good.

You were never in it for the history books. You were in it to change your part of history.

Abigail Adams had a farm, a pen, a mind that could match any in Philadelphia, and the willingness to use all of it without waiting for permission or applause. The revolution would have been poorer without her. The republic would have been different. One of her sons became the sixth president. History remembers her, precisely because she focused on the doing.

On January 18, 1816, sixty-eight years old and certain she was dying, Abigail wrote a will. Under coverture, married women couldn’t own personal property — their belongings legally belonged to their husbands. A wife’s will had no legal force. She wrote one anyway. She opened it not with the customary sound mind and body but with a different formula: I Abigail Adams wife to the Hon[ora]ble John Adams of Quincy in the County of Norfolk, by and with his consent, do dispose of the following property. She bequeathed more than four thousand dollars in bank stock, a promissory note, toll-bridge shares, gowns, watches, and rings, almost all of it to female relatives. John found the document after her death and executed it as if it were legally binding.

She was unstoppable. Not performative. Be Abigail.

Sources and Inspiration

Abigail Adams - Woody Holton

The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation - Joseph J. Ellis

Self-Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle

Second Treatise of Government - John Locke

The Image - Daniel J. Boorstin

Race War, Class War, Same War: Both Will Tell You How to Live

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:59:51 GMT

Some days ago, on stage at the University of Chicago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told the audience that the American Revolution had been a war “against the billionaires of their time.” When the predictable backlash arrived, she doubled down. Then tripled. The framing was deliberate. It was also historically inverted: the colonists who started the war did not hate the wealthy, they were the wealthy. George Washington was among the richest men in the colonies. Hancock, Franklin, and Jefferson were comfortable men. The grievance against the Crown was constitutional: no taxation without representation, the consent of the governed, the natural rights of free men. Historical accuracy, for AOC, was beside the point. The point was the frame.

On the right, the framing has been steady for years. Tucker Carlson, on his Fox News show in April 2021, said the Democratic Party “is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” He repeated the framing across more than four hundred episodes. Charlie Kirk, before his death last September, put it more explicitly: “The great replacement is not a theory. It’s a reality. They are replacing white rural America with something different.” The “they” was unspecified and shifting. The threat was demographic. The politics were ethnic.

Each had taken a complex, multi-dimensional civic life and collapsed it into a single identity axis. AOC’s axis: class. Kirk’s axis: race. Each had identified an enemy category, the billionaire or the demographic replacer, and called for the in-group to defend itself. Each had located salvation in the destruction or removal of that category. Each had asked their audience to stop thinking about politics and start feeling about it. Each had succeeded.

Two different stages. Two different audiences. Two different grievances. Same move.

This is the architecture of American politics in 2026. The right is fighting a race war. The left is fighting a class war. Both have stopped fighting for anything in particular. Both are toxically empathetic in one dimension and adversarial in every other. Both have abandoned the founding premise that made this country possible.

A Canadian marketing professor named Gad Saad recently published a book called Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. His argument: when empathy overrides the universal rules that allow strangers to coexist, the empathy becomes pathological. The reception has been predictable. On the left, he is an apologist for white nationalism, an enabler of cruelty, a man who pathologizes compassion to license the persecution of immigrants and minorities. The historian of psychology Susan Lanzonia, writing in Salon, called the book “a structured attempt to dehumanize people who might be in need of empathy.” On the right, he is a brave truth-teller against the woke mind virus.

Both readings are wrong, and the way they are wrong is the diagnosis.

Saad’s target is a particular behavioral disposition: the disposition that lets empathy override the enforcement of universal rules. The empathized-with party in his framework is anyone, immigrant or native, rich or poor, friend or stranger, who is permitted to violate the reciprocal rules that make peaceful coexistence possible. The criminal who is excused because he is sympathetic. The assailant who is excused because she is marginalized. The vandal who is excused because his cause is righteous. Saad is identifying the suspension of the universal rule, not the population to whom the rule should apply. The framework is functional. It identifies a kind of behavior.

So many writing about Saad’s ideas are making the same mistake. Operating at the surface, with no understanding for what is being argued. That, or they are in bad faith.

We have lost the muscle for function-thinking.

Two questions, two societies

This is the underlying claim of The Open Society and Its Enemies, the book Karl Popper wrote in wartime exile in 1945 while watching the most educated civilization in Europe eat itself. Popper’s diagnosis was epistemological. The closed society asks: who should rule? It thinks in identities, in categories, in the question of which tribe gets the throne. The open society asks a different question: how do we design institutions so that bad rulers can be removed without bloodshed? The first question is identitarian. The second is functional. The whole architecture of the open society is the capacity to operate at the second register.

When that capacity erodes, the texts that depend on it become unreadable. Popper’s own famous footnote, that a tolerant society cannot extend unlimited tolerance to those who would destroy it, is now routinely quoted to justify the preemptive suppression of disliked speech. But Popper, in the very next sentence, wrote that suppression of intolerant philosophies “would certainly be most unwise” as long as rational argument and public opinion can counter them. The right to suppress activates only when the intolerant refuse to meet on the level of rational argument, when they “answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.” Popper was naming a functional condition. His readers now hear a tribal identification.

Or, more explicitly: people love mob censorship when they agree with it and call it fascist when they disagree with it. Only the second judgment can be correct. A worldview that reduces politics to good versus evil cannot hold both judgments at once.

Saad’s reception is the same failure on a smaller scale. He names a functional disposition. His readers, friend and critic alike, translate it into a group target. The translation tells you nothing about Saad. It tells you everything about the readers.

We see the label and miss the relation. We see the group and miss the function. We see the tribe and miss the architecture.

The political consequence is the collapse I have just described. AOC and Carlson are mirrors who mistake each other for enemies. Both have abandoned function-thinking for identity-thinking. Both have located evil in a category of person rather than in a kind of behavior. Both are profiting handsomely from the abandonment.

Look at the class warriors’ own behavior. In the 2026 California governor’s race, the Democratic Socialists of America endorsed Tom Steyer. Steyer’s resume: Stanford MBA, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, a private-equity career, the founder of a hedge fund whose portfolio included private prisons and coal. By the DSA’s stated criteria, Steyer is the precise category of person the organization exists to oppose. The endorsement made sense by the unstated criteria. He was on the right team. The DSA was self-aware about it, writing in their voter guide that “his wealth was earned through the exploitation of the working class” before endorsing him anyway as “the most progressive of the current viable candidates.” The class war’s enemy is the billionaire from the wrong tribe. The billionaire from the right tribe gets a press release.

The right operates the same way. The anti-elite Republican Party is led, at almost every level of its current political class, by Ivy League graduates. JD Vance went to Yale Law. Ron DeSantis went to Yale and Harvard. Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley: Harvard, Harvard, Yale. The populist insurgency against the credentialed elite is the credentialed elite running the show. The principle is identitarian in operation, functional only in costume.

The principle was a costume

Watch the No Kings rallies that filled American streets through the late winter and into spring. The concern was constituted by January 6th. Donald Trump courts the strongman aesthetic, and the concern that he might not relinquish power on schedule is a grounded one. And yet many of the same demonstrators chant “No Kings” against Trump while elevating Bernie Sanders and AOC as moral authorities, receiving their pronouncements on what should be confiscated, who should be excluded from civic standing, what counts as legitimate accumulated wealth, as if they descended from a more enlightened mountain. The No Kings protester sees the royalism gathering on the right. She misses the royalism gathering inside her own ranks. Both are royalism. Both are asking the closed society’s question: who should rule? The open society would ask something else.

Eric Hoffer saw this coming in 1951. The True Believer is the foundational 20th-century text on mass-movement psychology, and its uncomfortable insight is that the content of a movement matters less than what the movement offers psychologically. The frustrated individual (Hoffer’s term) seeks self-renunciation, belonging, a clear enemy, and an explanation for personal failure that locates the cause outside the self. Any movement that supplies these will do. Which is why people convert between movements that seem ideologically opposite. The communist becomes a fascist. The religious zealot becomes a political radical. The costume differs left and right. The psychological function is identical.

Hoffer would not have been surprised that the leading anti-billionaire and anti-immigrant figures are competing for the same recruits. Both are selling refuge from the burden of selfhood. Both are offering a category onto which the frustrated individual can project all that ails him. The class warrior says: your suffering is the billionaire’s fault. The race warrior says: your suffering is the immigrant’s fault. Neither says: your suffering may be partially your own, and your work, and the slow accumulated weight of choices you have not made. Mass movements cannot offer that. It would empty the seats.

I’ve written elsewhere about the asymmetric historical sequence: the left shifted first and further through institutional capture, and the right shifted reactively after. That account stands. This essay describes the present moment, in which both tribes have arrived at the same structural place from different directions. A politics collapsed into a single identity axis, executed with identical mechanism even where the political content differs.

The class warrior and the race warrior are drawing from the same well.

There is a further problem on the class side that compounds the diagnosis. The policy menu the class warriors propose (confiscatory wealth taxes, mandatory dissolutions of large fortunes, the suppression of accumulated capital as an existential threat) does not just fail to grow the pie. It actively shrinks it. And shrinking pies produce scarcity politics. And scarcity politics produce violence. The historical signature is consistent across every redistributive-by-force movement of the modern era. France 1789. Russia 1917. Cambodia 1975. Venezuela. The class war produces the conditions that justify the class war. The doom loop is the whole structure.

Adam Smith identified the substrate two and a half centuries ago. Commercial society, by which Smith meant the positive-sum cooperation of strangers across vast distances under a system of stable property rights, is what made the modern world’s civility possible. Take away the substrate and you get the war of all against all that Smith and Hobbes were trying to climb out of. The class warrior who promises to redistribute the pie has not yet noticed that her policies first shrink it, then poison the conditions of its regrowth, then create the politics under which her further escalation becomes possible.

The race warrior has his own doom loop. The great-replacement framing corrodes civic trust. Corroded civic trust produces tribal sorting. Tribal sorting produces ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflict justifies more aggressive ethnic defense. Each turn of the spiral produces more demand for the next.

Neither doom loop is accidental. Each is a business model.

This is the part that should make us angry rather than philosophical. Tucker Carlson prospects for the great replacement rather than believing in it. He scans the discourse for the most engagement-rich toxic vein and inserts himself as its mastering voice. He is, as far as I can tell, simply tuned to elevating himself by any means available. Empty.

AOC is different in motive. Her heart, I believe, is in the right place; her alignment and her tactics are not. When the toxic vein of billionaire-hatred opened on the left, she stepped into it and mastered it. The motive differs from Carlson’s. The structural move is identical.

Both are operating, sincerely or cynically, inside a market that pays single-dimension identity politics on both sides far more than it pays for functional thinking. The philosopher Roger Scruton put the deeper mechanism this way: “Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.”

The discourse economy of 2026 rewards race war and class war. It does not reward Madison. It does not reward Popper. It does not reward Smith. The function is invisible to the algorithm. The tribe is engagement gold.

But the function is the inheritance. This is the thing the class warrior and the race warrior have in common: they are both standing on top of an architecture they have neither read nor understood, and they are both busy dismantling it for parts.

James Madison wrote Federalist No. 10 in November 1787 to talk a divided New York into ratifying a constitution that was not yet a country. The essay is the most important short document in American political philosophy because it solves a problem the ancients had given up on. Faction, Madison wrote, is “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens.” “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.” Faction cannot be eliminated without destroying liberty itself. Madison’s solution was structural. Extend the sphere wide enough that no single faction can become a national majority. Multiply interests until they check each other. Make the very multiplicity of factions the safeguard.

The architecture assumes faction of every kind: race-based, class-based, religious, geographic. It is designed to prevent any single one of these from capturing the state. What AOC and Carlson are each trying to do, collapse American politics into a single identity axis and mobilize a national majority along that axis, is the precise failure mode Madison built the Constitution to prevent.

This is the betrayal. Not the policies. Not the rhetoric. The architecture itself.

The country of ideas

The founders made a deliberate choice that almost every other country at almost every other moment in history did not make. They made America an idea rather than a bloodline. No religious test. No ethnic qualification. No noble inheritance. Citizenship by birth or by oath. The Constitution was silent on race because Madison and Hamilton were inconsistent men writing for an inconsistent country, but it was loud about function: what a citizen does, what an officeholder swears, what an institution must perform.

The asymmetry this produces is what makes America strange. You cannot become a different bloodline. You cannot become a different ancestor. You can spend a lifetime adjacent to a culture, marry into a family, raise children inside it, and you will still not be ethnically of it in the way the next generation will be ethnically of you. But you can become American. The country was set up that way deliberately. America is the only nation in the modern world that is constitutively becomeable, and it is becomeable precisely because it is an idea rather than a tribe. Citizenship is an act, not an assignment. You write your story by participating.

The class warrior takes this away from you in one direction. You are assigned: to a class, to an oppressor category, to an enemy line that runs through your bank account and decides your political weight before you have opened your mouth. The race warrior takes it away in the opposite direction. You are born: into a bloodline, a soil, an ancestry that fixes your civic standing before you have done a single act of citizenship. Both deny the founding. Both replace the idea with an identity. Both pretend that an axis the architecture was designed to neutralize is the axis on which everything must now turn. Both want you living inside their vision rather than writing your own. Both will tell you how to live. Neither will tell you how to become.

If we let them, the country they hand back to us will not be the one we inherited. It will be a country where your worth is your category and your category is your fate. We have a name for that country in the historical record. It is the country we crossed an ocean and fought a revolution to escape from, the one whose categorical assignments and inherited stations our founders specifically said we would refuse to recreate.

The honest defense is forward-looking. It refuses both the golden-age fantasy and the single-dimension capture. It runs on a simple test you can carry into the next political claim you encounter: is this naming a behavior, or is this naming a category of person? Behavior is judgeable. Behavior can be addressed. Category is fate dressed up as analysis. The first question keeps the open society open. The second one closes it.

The civic work that follows is designing systems people can flourish inside, rather than assigning identities people are stuck inside. The founders’ deepest bet was that ordinary people, given the right architecture, could participate their way into the country rather than be sorted into it. The bet held this long because each generation chose to make it again.

It is the work of citizens. Citizenship in the older sense, the sense the founders meant, was a thing you became by doing. We still, for now, get to choose to do it.

Sources and Inspiration

The True Believer - Eric Hoffer

The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith

Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind - Gad Saad

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left - Roger Scruton

The Comfort of Knowing How You'll Fail

Daniel Hatke — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:16:39 GMT

You’re about to walk into the room and you already know how it ends. You’ve decided it. Somewhere between the parking lot and the door, a quiet verdict settled in: you’re going to blow it. You’ll say the wrong thing, or not enough of the right thing. Your voice will thin out at the crucial moment. They’ll see through you.

And then you walk in, and it happens exactly like that.

Later, you’ll tell yourself the doubt was justified. See? I knew I wasn’t ready. The evidence is right there: the stumble, the silence, the missed beat. What you won’t notice is the direction of the causation. The doubt came first. The failure followed its instructions.

I know this loop because I’ve lived inside it. The night before a conversation I care about, running scenarios where I lose. The morning of something that matters, cataloguing reasons it won’t work. There’s a strange comfort in it. Certainty, more than pleasure. When you doubt, you can see very clearly where you’re going. You have a map. The map says failure, and the map is accurate, and there’s something almost peaceful about that accuracy. Uncertainty is the harder thing: not knowing whether you’ll succeed, not knowing who you’d be if you did.

We prefer the certain failure to the uncertain success. The deeper trade is identity: we prefer a known self to an unknown self, even when the known self is suffering. That preference costs us more than we admit.

Robert Anton Wilson had a name for this: the Thinker and the Prover. The nervous system operates like a computer. The Thinker enters the program, and the Prover executes it. Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. Think the world is hostile, and the Prover will surface every slight, every sideways glance, every piece of evidence that confirms the hostility. Think you’re unlucky, and watch the Prover assemble a case so thorough you’d swear it was objective.

The hardware is neutral. It doesn’t evaluate the instruction. It doesn’t ask whether the program is true. It asks only what it’s been told to find, and then it finds it with fidelity.

This means doubt is not what we think it is. We experience doubt as observation: I’m looking at myself clearly, and I see someone who will fail. But the Thinker/Prover loop inverts the causation. The doubt writes the situation it claims to read.

Wilson put it bluntly: “Doubts tell it not to perform.” You tell the Prover you’re inadequate, and the Prover goes to work: tightens the throat, scatters the preparation, selects for every micro-expression of boredom in the audience while filtering out every nod. The Prover is diligent. It will build the case you asked for.

And here is what makes the loop so durable: the Prover makes you right. You predicted failure, and failure arrived, so the prediction feels validated. Each cycle reinforces the last. The doubt was a prophecy that arranged its own fulfillment, then pointed to the wreckage as proof.

The Thinker doesn’t just install single instructions, though. It builds what Wilson called reality tunnels: perceptual worlds organized around a core belief. Self-doubt is a tunnel you live inside. The kind of person who fails at things like this. The tunnel sorts evidence at the entrance: what confirms passes through; everything else becomes anomaly, exception, luck. Inside the tunnel, success becomes anomaly. You succeeded despite being the person who usually doesn’t. The tunnel stays intact.

The machine doesn’t care which program you give it. The Prover will confirm your brilliance with the same fidelity it confirms your worthlessness. The question is who’s writing the code. And for most of us, the answer is: whoever wrote it last. The doubt program runs because no one told it to stop.

This is worth holding onto: the Prover doesn’t care about politics, ideology, or tribe. It runs whatever program it’s given. The doubter who has convicted themselves before they enter the room is running one program. The true believer who cannot be wrong (the activist whose movement is on the right side of history, the founder whose vision cannot fail, the partisan whose tribe is correct by definition) is running the inverse program on identical hardware. Both are escape routes. The doubter escapes into certain failure; the believer escapes into certain success. Neither has to risk becoming. The certainties are different; the refusal is the same.

The body already knows

Timothy Gallwey saw the same mechanism from the body side. In Gallwey’s framing the Thinker is Self 1, the narrating and judging voice; the Prover, in the body, is what Self 1’s distrust produces. The Thinker says “I’ll fail.” The Prover tightens the muscles, quickens the breath, floods the system with the chemistry of anticipated disaster. Self 2, the body-mind that knew what to do all along, gets muscled out of its own performance.

The capacity was never missing. Watch the athlete who practices beautifully and freezes under pressure. The skill was there the whole time. Between the practice court and the match, something was added: the weight of watching herself, the running commentary, the judge.

Gallwey’s students needed less narration. Confidence was beside the point. When he redirected their attention to the rhythm of the ball, the conscious mind got occupied, and the body was freed to do what it already knew. Doubt, seen this way, is an excess. The narrator won’t shut up. The judge won’t leave the courtroom. And as long as the commentary runs, the performer can’t perform.

The comfort of certain failure

So the machine can be reprogrammed. The interference can be quieted. The Thinker can think new thoughts. Self 1 can learn to trust Self 2. The capacity is there; the obstacle is removable.

Then why don’t we remove it?

Because doubt is comfortable. I mean this. Doubt gives you something that trust doesn’t: a clear picture of where you’re headed. When you doubt, you can see the failure coming. You can prepare for it, brace against it, rehearse your reaction to it. You know exactly who you are in the story: the person who wasn’t quite good enough. That identity is painful, but it’s stable. You know how to live inside it.

Augustine described this 1,600 years ago, in different vocabulary: “the worse whereto I was inured, prevailed more with me than the better whereto I was unused.” The horror grew the closer he came to becoming other than he was. The doubt program is the same dynamic at the inner-game scale.

Trust, by contrast, is vertigo. If you quiet the narrator and let Self 2 work, you don’t know what happens next. You might succeed. And then what? Success means you were wrong about yourself. It means the reality tunnel you’ve been living inside was a construction. It means you have to revise the story, which means you have to tolerate not knowing who you are while the new story forms. That uncertainty is what doubt exists to prevent.

Erich Fromm would recognize this. He spent his career mapping the escape routes people take when freedom becomes unbearable: authoritarianism, destructiveness, conformity. Elsewhere I named another route Fromm didn’t catalogue: the informed spectator. Self-doubt is its private twin, the same mechanism turned inward. The spectator never acts because they see through every actor. The doubter never acts because they have already convicted themselves. If you doubt yourself completely enough, you never have to exercise your freedom. You never have to choose, risk, build. The doubt chooses for you, and you get to call it realism. The most respectable escape from agency is the one that looks like self-awareness.

I recognize this in myself: the careful voice that calls caution what is actually retreat. And the inverse: sometimes my doubt has been the only honest thing in the room, and I learned to override it, and I was wrong to. The frame has to allow for that or it stops being a diagnosis and becomes a closed loop dressed up as one. No wonder we’ve pathologized anxiety.

Rollo May saw the cost. Anxiety, he said, is the price of becoming. We feel it because we’re approaching something we haven’t been before. The person who feels no anxiety has stopped growing. Self-doubt numbs that anxiety by foreclosing the becoming. You can’t fail at what you never attempt. You can’t face the vertigo of a new self if you never let the old self be wrong. Doubt is an anesthetic for the pain of possibility.

But the daily conquest May described requires bearing exactly this pain. The line he quotes is from Faust, and the doubt program is the inverse Faustian bargain: certain failure as the price of never having to risk becoming. Different terms, same refusal.

The program reinstalls itself every morning and must be overridden every morning. Metaprogramming the Thinker is a practice. It has the same rhythm as May’s choosing oneself: you do it today, or you don’t. And if you skip enough days, you forget you ever could.

The Prover doesn’t have preferences. It doesn’t want you to fail. It doesn’t want you to succeed. It takes the instruction and executes it with perfect fidelity.

The doubt you carry is the mechanism that delivers the outcome you fear. And the reason it persists is that certain failure is easier to bear than uncertain freedom. You know who you are when you doubt. You don’t know who you’d be if you stopped.

That uncertainty is where the living happens. The part of you that already knows how to perform, how to speak, how to build, is waiting for the narrator to stop talking.

It has been waiting for a long time.

Sources and Inspiration

Prometheus Rising - Robert Anton Wilson

The Inner Game of Tennis - Timothy Gallwey

Man’s Search for Himself - Rollo May

Confessions - Augustine of Hippo

Grant Me Courage, But Not Yet

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 18:54:22 GMT

The essay worked. For about a week.

I recognized myself in the paralysis of the over-aware: the person who sits at dinner cataloguing everyone’s escape mechanisms while saying nothing.

I promise, I don’t ruin dinner parties. Allow me to paint.

A week later I was back in the reading chair. Three channels open: a paper on democratic backsliding, a Canon source I’d been meaning to finish, a draft covering the 250th. Excellent reasons, all of them, for staying exactly where I was.

I know the name for this. I wrote the name for it. The naming changed nothing.

Anyone who has tried to change a deeply rooted pattern or habit knows the moment. The insight arrives. The behavior doesn’t follow. You see the mechanism with real clarity. You can explain it to others. And you keep doing the thing you just diagnosed. Something deeper than knowledge holds the gap open between seeing and doing.

Aristotle, twenty-three centuries ago, described people who “take refuge in talk” and “flatter themselves they are philosophising,” acting “very like those sick people who listen to the doctor with great attention but do nothing that he tells them.” The patient nodding at the doctor is the oldest portrait of the over-aware reader. Seven centuries later, a North African rhetorician sat in a garden in Milan and described why the nodding never stops.

The prayer of the educated

Augustine of Hippo (an excellent name) was a man who understood things beautifully and changed nothing for years. A professor of rhetoric in fourth-century Milan, he had spent his adult life collecting positions: Manichaeism, Neo-Platonism, the ambitious social climbing of a young academic on the make. He knew, by the time he sat in that garden in 386, what he should do. He had known for a long time. His prayer from this period is the most honest sentence written about the human will: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

He explains in the Confessions that he feared God would hear him too soon and cure the disease before he was ready to let it go. He wanted transformation. He also wanted the familiar comforts a little longer. Both desires were genuine, living in the same person at the same moment.

His description of the divided will in Book VIII is the earliest clinical account of what it means to want to change and be unable to begin. “The mind commands the body, and it obeys instantly; the mind commands itself, and is resisted.” The will does not fail because it is weak. It fails because it is split. One part reaches toward the life you know is better. Another clings to what it knows. Augustine insists: this is the structure of human will itself.

“The consequence of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity.” Will hardens into habit. Habit hardens into identity. The person who has been observing rather than acting for long enough doesn’t just prefer observation. They have become an observer. The pattern has calcified into the self.

What makes Augustine cataclysmic for the over-aware is his diagnosis of the educated. He was a professional persuader, and he discovered that rhetorical skill works internally as well as externally. The same techniques he used to win arguments in the lecture hall, he used to construct plausible narratives of delay for himself. One more system to study. One more framework to master. One more season of preparation before the real work begins. At his breaking point he cried out: “The unlearned start up and take heaven by force, and we with our learning, and without heart, lo, where we wallow in flesh and blood!”

This is very high-status cope.

The educated are better at self-deception precisely because they have more tools for it. The sophisticated case for “not yet” comes with citations and frameworks explaining why the timing isn’t right, why the problem needs more study before anyone should act. The understanding becomes the delay.

Augustine’s garden conversion is well known. The years of knowing-without-changing that preceded it are the real lesson. The divided will wasn’t resolved by one more argument, one more insight, one more conversation. He heard a child’s voice chanting tolle lege: take up and read. He opened the scriptures at random. This moment was the end of postponement.

The question reversed

Viktor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, watched the divided will under conditions no soul should know. In the extermination camps, he observed a pattern: prisoners who maintained a reason to live (a manuscript to rewrite, a child waiting somewhere, a task left unfinished) survived at higher rates than those who lost their sense of purpose. The moment a prisoner’s meaning collapsed, the body followed. Sometimes within days.

Frankl arrived at Auschwitz with the manuscript of his life’s work sewn into the lining of his coat. The guards took the coat. He spent the rest of the war reconstructing the book on scraps of paper and in his head. The system he called logotherapy was built in the place that should have made meaning impossible.

Its central claim was that the primary human drive is neither pleasure nor power. It is meaning. And meaning arrives through engagement: through work, through love, through how you bear what cannot be changed.

This matters for the over-aware because the analytical loop they’re trapped in is a form of what Frankl called the existential vacuum: the condition of meaninglessness that emerges when traditions, instincts, and social roles no longer tell you what your life is for. The vacuum manifests as restlessness, as the “Sunday neurosis” that arrives when the week’s distractions stop and you’re left alone with the question of whether any of it matters. The vacuum fills itself. With consumption, with conformity, with ideology, with entertainment. Or, for the sophisticated, with analysis. Understanding becomes the content that fills the space where purpose should be. The reading chair, filled with excellent frameworks about human purpose, is the Sunday neurosis in its most vaunted form.

Frankl’s prescription was a reversal. Stop asking what you want from life. Ask what life wants from you. “It did not really matter what we expected from life,” he wrote, “but rather what life expected from us.” And then the line that is the essay’s whole thesis in his voice: “Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.” Each person is questioned by life. You answer by answering for your own life, by being responsible for what is in front of you.

It challenges the therapeutic model that dominates contemporary self-improvement, where the self is the project and understanding the self is the method. Frankl argued that self-actualization pursued directly will always miss its target. “The more one forgets himself, by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love, the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.” Self-transcendence, meaning found outside the self rather than through more introspection, is the way out of the loop.

What is asking for your response right now? A community that needs someone to show up. A conversation that needs radical honesty. A project that needs someone to begin it badly so it can eventually be done well. Seeing your own children more clearly. Publishing in your own voice, on your concerns, attempting to illuminate. You must listen to know what is calling.

Frankl made this argument as a man who had lost his wife, his parents, his brother, his manuscript, and his freedom. He spent the war reconstructing the destroyed manuscript on scraps of paper. After liberation, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in nine days: response to what life was asking of him.

Two brothers, one question

Augustine described the divided will. Frankl prescribed the reversal. Fyodor Dostoevsky, writing in 1880, dramatized both the failure and the alternative in two characters who share a surname but inhabit different worlds.

Ivan Karamazov is the over-aware figure rendered in literature. He is brilliant. He has read everything. He constructs the case against cosmic justice: the Grand Inquisitor, who explains to a returned Christ why the Church was right to take away the freedom Christ offered, because people never wanted it and cannot use it. Ivan sees through every mechanism, every institution, every comfortable lie.

And he goes mad.

His trajectory is analysis without response, understanding without responsibility. He formulates the argument that makes his father’s murder philosophically possible, and his half-brother Smerdyakov, less sophisticated and more literal, carries it out. Smerdyakov tells him it was following his words that he did it. Ivan expected nothing from his own arguments, because expecting would have required choosing, and choosing was what the analysis was designed to avoid.

Yet even Ivan cannot extinguish the irrational fact of his own aliveness. “I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring,” he confesses to his brother Alyosha. “I love the blue sky. I love some people, whom one loves sometimes without knowing why.” The experience of being alive exceeds the categories available to explain it. This is the crack in every purely rationalist framework. Ivan loves life and cannot figure out what to do with that love.

Alyosha can. He is less intellectually sophisticated than his brother. He cannot construct the Grand Inquisitor’s argument or return God’s entrance ticket with philosophical panache. What he can do is show up. He practices what Father Zosima called “active love,” distinguished sharply from love in dreams: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.” Active love is specific, inconvenient, directed at the person in front of you rather than at humanity in the abstract.

There is a scene near the middle of the novel when Zosima dies and Alyosha, shattered by grief and doubt, walks outside into the night. He falls to the earth and kisses it, weeping. He does not understand what is happening to him. He has no framework for the experience. Something moves through him that his categories cannot hold, and he responds to it with his body before his mind catches up. Dostoevsky writes that Alyosha “did not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it all.” And then: “He had fallen on the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a resolute champion.” The moment is Ivan’s trajectory in reverse: surrender producing wholeness. Augustine’s will, finally undivided. Frankl’s self-transcendence before Frankl had the word for it.

And here the essay reaches the edge of its own usefulness. One more source. One more framework. One more essay. Building the Canon for this publication itself can become the sophisticated person’s version of “not yet.”

Augustine would see the pattern in his readers. By the time he wrote the Confessions, he had crossed the threshold. He was a rhetorician who finally stopped rehearsing.

The question that matters is what is asking for your response right now.

Frankl would say you already know. You’ve known since before you opened this essay. There is a conversation you’ve been avoiding, a friend you’ve been watching from a distance, a project you’ve been preparing for long enough that the preparation has become the thing. Seeing your family, your children, as work rather than calling and purpose.

Professor Wadhwa in grad school asked each of us, “What is your purpose?” We had answers ready — career titles, ambitions, the next milestone. None of them was what he meant.

We had no idea. We had been checking boxes, moving up ladders, rarely reflecting. He left us with “If you do not know your purpose, your purpose is to find your purpose.”

Wadhwa’s invitation was one of agency. We had been climbing through systems that required pleasing gatekeepers. We, a roomful of high-achievers, largely had not asked ourselves what we wanted and how we wanted to go get it. Our comfort was in the achieving. Stepping beyond the threshold asked much more of us than pleasing gatekeepers. We needed to listen and find the courage to go forth.

The divided will has been running the clock, and it will keep running as long as the understanding substitutes for the doing.

Augustine heard a child’s voice in the garden: tolle lege. Take up and read. He had been reading his entire life. What he finally did was begin.

Sources and Inspiration

Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle

Confessions - Augustine of Hippo

Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ornamental Rules: On microlooting, grift, and norm enforcement

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:18:59 GMT

The token launched on a Friday, three days before the inauguration. A cryptocurrency bearing the incoming president’s name. No equity. No product. No underlying asset beyond the name and the implied access to power. By Saturday morning, the market capitalization was in the billions. His wife launched a companion token that weekend.

This should trigger something in the system. Some clause, some mechanism, some piece of the architecture that fifty-five men spent four months in Philadelphia designing with precisely this danger in mind. The founders were obsessed with the corrosion of public office by private interest. They wrote an emoluments clause. They designed competing branches with oversight authorities. They built accountability into the structure because they knew, from hard experience, that power untended will serve itself.

The machinery sat idle. Not because it was broken. Because it had been jammed from the inside.

The founders feared two forms of tyranny: majority and minority. They’d fought a revolution against the second and built a constitution against the first. Madison’s architecture: checks that slow power without freezing it, balances that distribute authority without fragmenting it, competing interests forced through the friction of deliberation to produce workable outcomes.

That architecture has been captured.

A single senator can hold up dozens of executive appointments indefinitely. Sixty votes are required for anything consequential in a body where fifty-one was designed to be sufficient. A minority of the population controls a majority of the Senate through geographic distribution the founders never anticipated at this scale. The filibuster, the hold, the procedural motion, the committee chair’s pocket veto: each came to function as a brake. Together they function as a lock.

This is minority rule. A third kind, one the founders didn’t specifically engineer against: procedural capture by organized minorities who can block everything and build nothing. The system serves those who’ve learned to operate the machinery itself.

Each of these mechanisms came to be justified as a constraint on power. But a constraint wielded by the powerful to prevent their own accountability is a tool of the very power it claims to check. The filibuster itself was never designed at all. It emerged from an accidental rule change in 1806 and was only later rationalized as a deliberative safeguard. The filibuster invoked to force deliberation is one thing. The filibuster invoked to prevent a vote on emoluments enforcement is another. The form is the same. The function has inverted.

The pattern has a name. James Burnham, in The Machiavellians (1943), drew the distinction between a political rule’s formal meaning — what it explicitly says, the deliberative purpose it claims — and its real meaning: what the rule actually does, whose interests it protects, which arrangements it serves. Formal meaning can persist intact while real meaning inverts. The ornamentation stays. The function moves underneath it.

The procedural apparatus justified as deliberation has become a system of toll booths. The senator who holds up a nominee extracts concessions. The committee chair who controls the markup extracts provisions. The gap between what the Senate claims to do and what its procedures actually do has widened until the stated purpose is decoration on a locked door. When every node in a system has a veto, dispersed power becomes dispersed obstruction.

The result is stasis.

Extraction adapts to anything humans have built: chaos, transitions, every environment. What stasis provides is something specific: impunity. When the accountability machinery is frozen, extraction can operate in daylight. The system that would punish it can’t move.

What stasis provides is something specific: impunity.

Who the ice serves

Treating all extraction as identical is part of how it survives. There are three layers, and the distinctions matter.

The first is genuinely bipartisan. Members of Congress trade on information they receive in classified briefings, oversight hearings, and regulatory previews. They designed the disclosure requirements themselves, and designed them to be functionally toothless. The STOCK Act was supposed to end this. Instead it created paperwork nobody enforces and penalties nobody fears. The institution is corrupt. Nearly everyone in the building participates or quietly tolerates those who do. When someone says “both sides” about congressional stock trading, they’re right. The whole body is implicated.

The second is paired but asymmetric. Each coalition’s authoritarian shadow shows up on its own side of the spectrum.

Two administrations used federal banking regulators to cut off disfavored industries from the financial system. Under Obama, it was firearms dealers and payday lenders. Under Biden, it was crypto companies. Both times, businesses found their banking relationships severed by coordinated regulatory pressure. Both times, it was done quietly, denied through official channels, and confirmed only through document requests and whistleblowers. Disgusting. Un-American. And done in the dark because those who did it understood it was wrong.

The Trump family’s extraction operates in daylight. The cryptocurrency tokens launched during the transfer of power, while the incoming president had no blind trust, no divestiture, no ethics review in place. The foreign licensing deals that continued through the first presidency were public knowledge; so were the hotel bookings by foreign governments seeking favor.

Jared Kushner’s firm received two billion dollars from the Saudi Public Investment Fund six months after he left the West Wing. The fund’s own screening panel had recommended against the deal: excessive fees, inexperienced management, operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Mohammed bin Salman overruled the panel personally.

None of this was hidden. None of it triggered consequence. Three emoluments lawsuits were filed during the first term. Not one reached a ruling on the merits. Two were vacated as moot when the term ended. The procedural machinery to adjudicate them had been jammed by the same vetocracy that paralyzes everything else.

The distinction between concealed and open corruption is about what each does to the system. Karl Popper understood that the rules of an open society are not self-maintaining. Normative rules exist only through the willingness to enforce them. A rule that is openly broken without sanction has already become ornamental. Hidden corruption, for all its ugliness, acknowledges the system’s authority by fearing exposure. The corrupt actor calculates that consequences exist and acts accordingly. Open corruption makes a different calculation: that the system cannot respond. And when that calculation proves correct in public, it teaches everyone watching the same lesson.

Hannah Arendt spent her career studying what happens when that lesson takes hold. She called it thoughtlessness: the point at which transgression becomes so normalized that ordinary people stop recognizing it as transgression. The danger lived in the moment the public stopped distinguishing between the ordinary and the monstrous, because the language for making that distinction had been emptied of meaning. A system where corruption hides is a system where the rules still carry weight. A system where corruption operates in daylight, without consequence, is a system where the rules have become ornamental.

Both examples above are un-American. But the distinction between them matters. One conceals itself because it knows the system would punish it if the system could function. The other operates in the open because it has calculated that the system can’t function at all. That second calculation is the product of vetocracy, and its correctness teaches everyone watching that the rules are ornamental.

This is not a federal pattern alone. San Francisco’s BART system lost a generation of riders because the rules had become ornamental at the turnstile and on the platform: fare evasion, open drug use, the slow drift of ordinary decorum. Ridership is returning because the city started enforcing basic fare and basic civic minimums. At the same time, a New York Times Opinion podcast coined the term “microlooting” for stealing from corporations as political expression. The New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino, on the panel, said she had shoplifted from Whole Foods, “didn’t feel bad about it at all,” and concluded: “Everyone, try it. See what happens.” The framing: the rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I. These are different altitudes of the same lesson: where the rules are not enforced, they are not rules. What the Trump family extraction teaches from the top, microlooting teaches from the sidewalk. A population that accepts ornamental rules at the turnstile will accept them at the Senate.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa gave us the formula in The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” That is the familiar paradox of elite adaptation: surface transformation masking structural continuity. But vetocracy inverts it. Nothing changes. Nothing needs to. The system is frozen in a configuration that enables extraction, and the freeze is maintained by those who extract. The paralysis isn’t a side effect of the architecture. The paralysis is the architecture’s highest-value product.

The paralysis isn’t a side effect of the architecture. The paralysis is the architecture’s highest-value product.

Ordinary corruption works around the system: bribes, backroom deals, influence peddling that at least acknowledges the rules by breaking them secretly. What we have now works through the system. The vetocracy has made accountability structurally impossible, and the grift hides behind that impossibility. The rules are ornamental.

And we participate in this, quietly, by treating the paralysis as dysfunction rather than design. We shake our heads at gridlock as though it were weather. Something that just happens. But gridlock has beneficiaries. Stasis has operators. The question nobody asks about a frozen system is the most important one: who is sipping frozen margaritas?

The symmetry trap

“Both sides do it.”

In the right context, this is honest analysis. Congressional trading: both sides do it. Preference falsification, the habit of publicly conforming while privately disagreeing until you forget what you actually believed: both sides exhibit it. The psychological mechanisms of fleeing from freedom, trading the anxiety of choosing for the relief of someone else choosing for you: symmetric across the spectrum. True and useful and worth showing.

But “both sides do it” is also an ideology. And ideology is rationalization. The function of the phrase, applied reflexively to every instance of corruption, is permission. Permission to name nothing specific. Permission to treat escalating extraction as background noise because someone, somewhere, on the other side, once did something comparable.

The format is familiar: every panel has two sides, every scandal gets a whatabout, every accusation is met with an equivalent from the opposing archive. When everything is corrupt, nothing is specifically corrupt. When everyone is guilty, no one is particularly guilty. The wash is the point.

I’ve been writing about mechanisms across the spectrum, and about the costs when the “both sides” frame crosses from analysis into camouflage. I believe in showing the structure rather than the tribe. The psychological dynamics of mass movements, preference falsification, escape from freedom: these are genuinely symmetric. Showing that symmetry is honest work, and I’ll keep doing it.

But I’ve watched the symmetry become a hiding place. As long as every critique is paired, nothing gets named. As long as the mechanism is the focus, the specific actor disappears. We show that both sides exhibit the same psychological patterns, and someone walks away thinking the current theft is normal.

The current theft is not normal.

There is a difference between showing that both sides use the same psychological mechanisms and declaring that both sides are equally corrupt at any given moment. The first is an analytical observation. The second is a lie that protects whoever is currently doing the most damage.

The founders built this system so free people could govern themselves. They designed checks to restrain power and balances to distribute it. They assumed the machinery would function because they assumed citizens would insist that it function.

When the machinery is jammed from within, when extraction operates openly because the system can’t respond, when reflexive symmetry becomes the ideology that prevents naming what’s visible: the system has failed the purpose it was built to serve. And we are in a moment of generational crisis where the urgency of the moment becomes cover for what would be intolerable in calmer times.

I don’t know what the institutional fix is. Reform is blocked by the same vetocracy it would need to dismantle. Public pressure fractures along tribal lines before it can coalesce around specific, observable wrongs. Those who benefit from the paralysis have every incentive to maintain it. And vetocracy is only half the problem: it explains why courts and committees can’t act. The other half — why half the country doesn’t demand they act — is a different essay and a different shelf of the Canon.

And I won’t pretend that citizen-level honesty substitutes for structural reform. Plutarch could have told us two thousand years ago: individual virtue does not save a structurally rotten republic. Cato’s honor did not save Rome. But structural reform will stay blocked until enough citizens can see past reflexive symmetry and name what is in front of them. The citizen fix is what makes the structural fix possible.

But I think honesty requires distinction. Some corruption is genuinely bipartisan: name the institution. Some is paired but asymmetric: name both, but tell the truth about scale. Some is specific and directional: name it.

Grift is grift. Un-American is un-American. The willingness to say so, even when it looks like picking a side, may be the last check the founders didn’t write into the document.

But naming the grift is the easy part. We keep waiting for better leaders. Lincoln called for “the better angels of our nature,” and we keep expecting those angels to appear in the Senate, in the White House, in the committee chair’s office. They won’t. Lincoln’s better angels lived in the citizenry rather than the capitol.

And the citizenry’s work starts earlier than the ballot box, quieter, closer to home. It starts with the question I’ve been circling for months: am I signaling a position, or do I actually hold one? Am I performing analytical balance because I’ve examined the evidence and found symmetry, or because symmetry is more comfortable than what the evidence actually shows?

The unjamming is quiet work. It begins with stopping the private preference falsification: the small, daily decision to not-see what is plainly visible because seeing it would cost me my sense of being above the fray.

Arendt argued that action is a beginning rather than the conclusion of a process of understanding. The beginning she meant was ordinary. It was the decision to think when not-thinking is easier. To exercise judgment when procedure offers a comfortable substitute. The founders assumed citizens would provide the last check themselves. They didn’t write it into the document because they couldn’t: the willingness to see clearly, and then to speak from what you’ve seen, is not a mechanism anyone can design. It’s a practice. And like every practice, it exists only if people do it.

The machinery can be unjammed. But not from the outside, and not all at once. It gets unjammed one honest judgment at a time, by people who’ve stopped performing balance they don’t believe, who can distinguish between genuine bipartisan rot and specific directional extraction, and who are willing to bear the discomfort of saying so.

That willingness is the better angel. Nothing else qualifies.

Sources and Inspiration