The Prometheus Dispatch

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

The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley

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

How the World Really Works - Vaclav Smil

Factfulness - Hans Rosling

The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley

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.

The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch

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 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 Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch

Factfulness - Hans Rosling

The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley

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

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 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

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

Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom - James Burnham

The Leopard - Giuseppe di Lampedusa

The Virtue Premium

Daniel Hatke — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:16:49 GMT

In late 2023, Jacinda Ardern stood before a packed forum at the Harvard Kennedy School. She had resigned as New Zealand’s prime minister in January of that year, citing exhaustion, and was now collecting fellowships and global speaking engagements. Fortune had named her the world’s greatest leader. Time put her in its 100 most influential. Harvard had awarded her an honorary doctorate of laws.

Two years later, New Zealand holds twenty-one days of diesel reserves and is spending over a billion dollars to build an import terminal for the very fossil fuels Ardern’s government banned. Wholesale electricity prices have more than doubled. A record 131,000 people left the country in a single year, nearly forty percent of them under thirty.

The applause was real. So is the bill.

I’ve been watching this pattern across western democracies, and something keeps surfacing: a specific kind of policy failure that follows a specific kind of political success. Leaders signal a destination. The signal earns praise. Practical objections get coded as moral failure. And then the bill arrives, years later, in a currency the signalers no longer have to pay.

It’s happening everywhere. Left and right. Large economies and small. The content varies. The mechanism doesn’t.

New Zealand: twenty-one days of diesel

In 2018, Ardern’s government banned new offshore oil and gas exploration permits. The framing was climate leadership: New Zealand would lead the world into a post-fossil future. The Zero Carbon Act followed in 2019. A “wellbeing budget” prioritized sustainability metrics over GDP growth. The international press was rapturous.

Gas production fell roughly thirty percent in six years. The Marsden Point refinery, the country’s only fuel-processing facility, closed in March 2022, making New Zealand one hundred percent dependent on imported refined fuel. Nearly half its petrol now comes from South Korean refineries and a third from Singapore, both reliant on Middle Eastern crude transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

In 2020, the same year Ardern’s government declared a climate emergency, New Zealand imported over a million tonnes of Indonesian coal. The dirtiest fuel. Because domestic gas was declining and renewables couldn’t fill the gap. The signal said one thing. The grid and human well-being required another.

The knowledge needed to balance a power grid, secure supply chains, and manage energy transitions doesn’t sit in a parliament building. It’s dispersed across engineers, traders, geologists, real world practitioners. It can’t be legislated into existence. When a government signals away its domestic production before alternatives exist, the need gets displaced to somewhere harder to see and harder to control.

What happens to a country’s sovereignty when it holds three weeks of fuel?

Germany: the grid that went brown

Angela Merkel’s nuclear phase-out might be the purest case study of signaling-as-policy in the twenty-first century.

In 2010, Merkel’s center-right government extended the lifetimes of Germany’s seventeen nuclear reactors. Then Fukushima happened. Nine thousand kilometers away in Japan. The earthquake spooked the Baden-Württemberg state election, and Merkel reversed course entirely, shutting down eight reactors immediately and scheduling the rest for closure by 2022.

Seventy-one percent of Germans believed the reversal was tactical, not principled. It probably was. A center-right chancellor executed the Green Party’s signature policy because the electoral math demanded it.

Germany shut down its last reactor in April 2023. On the morning after, coal provided thirty percent of the country’s electricity. The signal was green. The grid was brown, dirty, and producing more carbon than ever.

The nuclear phase-out made Germany dependent on Russian gas. That dependency constrained its response when Russia invaded Ukraine: Berlin hesitated on sanctions, delayed weapons deliveries, and spent months arguing over an embargo that Poland and the Baltics demanded on day one. One signaling decision in 2011 narrowed Germany’s options in 2022, which damaged its credibility in 2023, which weakened the European security architecture that German industry depends on. The bill doesn’t arrive once. It compounds.

The direct costs alone: industrial electricity prices twenty-five percent above the EU average. BASF, Germany’s chemical flagship, investing nearly nine billion euros in a new plant in China while closing production lines at its historic Ludwigshafen site. Volkswagen cutting fifty thousand German jobs. Manufacturing lost 120,000 positions in 2024 alone. GDP contracted in both 2023 and 2024: the longest stretch of economic stagnation in seven decades.

Germany’s current energy minister, Katherina Reiche, in March 2026: “The phase-out of nuclear power was a huge mistake. A huge mistake.”

What do you tell the factory worker in Ludwigshafen whose job moved to China so that a politician could win a state election?

The United Kingdom: the sovereignty signal

Brexit was sold as a return to self-determination. “Take back control” was the phrase, and it worked because it named something real: a democratic deficit, a feeling that decisions were made elsewhere, by people who didn’t have to live with consequences.

But “take back control” was a signal, not a plan. The campaign bus drove around the country promising £350 million a week for the NHS, a figure the UK Statistics Authority called “a clear misuse of official statistics” during the campaign itself. Raising the objection got you coded as an elite remainer who didn’t respect the will of the people. The harder questions (supply chains, customs infrastructure, the Irish border, labor market dependence on EU workers) met the same reception.

Eric Hoffer wrote in 1951 that a rising mass movement holds a following “not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of individual existence.” Brexit offered that refuge to a post-industrial England that no longer knew what it was for. The doctrine came later: years of negotiations, multiple prime ministers, a Northern Ireland protocol nobody likes, and a bill that arrives in increments too small to make headlines but too large to ignore. UK goods trade with the EU fell by roughly twenty percent in real terms between 2019 and 2024. Business investment flatlined for six years after the referendum. The Centre for European Reform estimates a cumulative GDP shortfall of five percent relative to comparable economies. Bloomberg Economics puts the cost at roughly a hundred billion pounds a year in output the country simply doesn’t produce anymore. No single quarter looks catastrophic. The sum is.

The signal was sovereignty. The country took back control and spent six years discovering how much it couldn’t control alone.

Is there a version of patriotism that includes reading the fine print?

The historicist’s bill

Something connects these cases. It goes deeper than bad policy.

Karl Popper wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies in exile during World War II, watching the most educated civilization in Europe destroy itself. His target was historicism: the belief that history moves toward a knowable destination. Once you believe you know where history is heading, three things follow. Opposition becomes irrational (you’re fighting the tide). Present costs become acceptable (the destination justifies them). And coercion becomes a moral obligation, because you’re helping people arrive where they were going anyway.

The destination doesn’t have to be forward. Popper wrote about progressive historicism, but the mechanism runs in any direction. A restored golden age is still a destination. “Take back control” and “Make America Great Again” are as destination-certain as “the right side of history.” Each declares where things must end up and treats practical objections as betrayal of the vision. The direction is the costume. The certainty is the mechanism.

This sounds like an old problem, confined to Marxists and fascists who are safely dead. It is alive in ordinary Tuesday politics. “The right side of history.” “The arc of the moral universe.” “The clean energy future.” “Take back control.” Each phrase contains the same assumption: we know the destination, and anyone raising practical objections is naive at best, morally deficient at worst.

This is why the practical warnings get ignored. They aren’t heard as engineering concerns. They’re heard as character flaws. You can’t raise energy security without being coded as a climate denier. You can’t raise trade logistics without being coded as anti-sovereignty. You can’t raise integration capacity without being coded as racist. The historicist frame converts every practical question into a character test.

And so the bill keeps compounding.

The United States: the America First signal

Trump’s tariff program was historicism in its right-wing costume: a vision of national destiny that treated trade as a battleground and manufacturing return as inevitable, if only someone with sufficient will would force it.

The signal was “America First.” The assumption: levy enough tariffs and factories will come home, trade deficits will shrink, American workers will prosper. There’s a persistent belief that complex systems bend to executive authority, that trade-offs are problems of will rather than features of a dispersed and interdependent global order. The practical objections (tariffs function as consumer taxes, supply chains don’t reroute by decree, retaliation damages export sectors) were dismissed as globalist hand-wringing.

Soybean exports to China collapsed seventy-five percent in a single year. American farmers required twenty-eight billion dollars in emergency bailouts. The overall trade deficit grew by forty percent as imports rerouted through other countries. Manufacturing entered contraction before COVID arrived to take the blame. The second term doubled down: “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025 imposed duties on nearly all imports, and markets shed trillions in value within a week. Allied nations, treated as adversaries in trade negotiations, became less cooperative on defense and diplomacy. The signal said strength. The bill was paid by soybean farmers in Iowa and consumers in every state.

What does “America First” mean when America’s allies stop answering the phone?

---

Germany (again): the moral signal

In August 2015, Angela Merkel said “Wir schaffen das” and opened Germany’s borders. More than 1.2 million asylum applications followed in two years.

The signal was moral leadership: Germany, given its history, would demonstrate that a wealthy democracy could absorb the displaced. The practical questions (housing capacity, language training, labor market integration, the pace at which communities can absorb change) were coded as moral failure. Raising them meant you lacked compassion. I remember this coding well. I felt the pull of it: the sense that asking “how many?” was somehow the wrong question, that the only legitimate question was “how do we help?”

“How many?” was a real question. Germany now faces a housing shortage of 700,000 units. The AfD, which managed 4.7% in its first election in 2013, took 20.8% in the 2025 federal election and became the country’s second-largest party. Merkel’s own party, under Friedrich Merz, has reversed her immigration policies, breaking the political “firewall” she herself insisted on.

The strain of bearing an open society is real, and Popper never pretended otherwise. When people’s communities change faster than they can process, when their concerns are dismissed as bigotry, they don’t become more tolerant. They find someone who will listen. Often, that someone is worse than the problem they named.

When you make the practical question unspeakable, who benefits from the silence?

Australia: the signal cycle

Australia has been through three cycles of energy signaling in fifteen years. Labor signals climate ambition. The Coalition signals affordability and energy independence. Labor returns and signals again. Each government defines its energy policy against its predecessor’s signal rather than toward a coherent strategy.

The result is investment paralysis. Who builds a power plant when the policy environment reverses every election cycle? Who commits capital to a twenty-year project in a country that can’t hold a policy for four? Australia missed its window for nuclear, which remains banned by federal law. Its grid lurches between renewable targets and emergency coal extensions. It exports massive volumes of LNG while domestic gas prices climb.

The signal, whichever direction it points at any given moment, is always confident. The grid, which doesn’t care about confidence, is increasingly fragile.

The country with antibodies

Poland crossed one trillion dollars in GDP in 2025, entering the world’s twenty largest economies. In 1990, it was thirty-eighth, behind Pakistan and Algeria. Since joining the EU in 2004, its economy has grown at an average of 3.8% per year against the EU average of 1.8%. It was the only EU country to avoid recession during the 2008 financial crisis. GDP per capita has risen from roughly half the EU average to over eighty percent in two decades.

The numbers are striking. But the numbers aren’t the interesting part.

In 2015, Poland opened an LNG terminal at Świnoujście, years before Russian gas dependence was a crisis. In October 2022, the Baltic Pipe from Norway came online, timed to coincide with the expiration of Poland’s Russian gas contract. When Russia cut off gas supplies in April 2022, Poland’s storage was over seventy-five percent full and its alternatives were already built. The country spends 4.7% of GDP on defense: more than any NATO member, including the United States. It is building Westinghouse nuclear reactors, with the first now projected for 2036.

It absorbed nearly a million Ukrainian refugees with a seventy-eight percent employment rate, the highest in the OECD. Practical integration infrastructure, built quietly before it was needed, did the work that grand moral declarations could not.

President Lech Kaczyński warned in 2008 that “today it is Georgia, tomorrow it may be Ukraine, then the Baltic States, and later, perhaps, Poland.” Defense Minister Radek Sikorski compared Nord Stream to “a new Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.” Western leaders dismissed them. Poland built the LNG terminal anyway.

Poland is not a clean case. Under PiS, it ran its own signaling operation on cultural issues: attacks on judicial independence, “LGBT-free zone” declarations, media pressure campaigns. Poland paid a virtue premium there too, in EU funding freezes and institutional credibility. But on the questions that determine whether a country can feed and heat itself, Poland built before it announced.

Why? Because Poland spent forty-four years inside the ultimate historicist experiment. Marxism was historicism turned into daily life: history has a direction, the Party knows it, resistance is irrational, present suffering is justified by the destination. Poles know, in their bones, what happens when the signal becomes the policy. The country has scar tissue where Western democracies have theory.

Popper called this piecemeal social engineering: small, testable reforms rather than utopian redesign. Fix what’s broken. Test the fix. Adjust. The work is unglamorous and doesn’t earn keynote invitations. It builds LNG terminals before you need them.

I wrote earlier that the skills that win elections have nothing to do with governing. This is that mechanism scaled up. The signal that earns magazine covers and honorary degrees is rarely the signal that prepares a country for what’s coming.

The virtue premium is what you pay when you optimize for applause instead of resilience. It compounds quietly. The leader who earned the praise is gone by the time the bill arrives. And the bill always arrives: in fuel reserves measured in days, in factories relocated to other continents, in young people leaving for countries that still have functioning grids and economies.

I feel this pull in myself. The desire to be on the right side of wherever history is going. It feels like wisdom. It feels like moral clarity. But Popper’s warning keeps surfacing: once you believe you know the destination, everyone who raises a practical objection becomes an obstacle. The distance between “I know where this is going” and “get out of my way” is shorter than any of us would like to admit.

Pragmatism has blind spots of its own: it can mistake caution for wisdom and lose the capacity to mobilize when mobilization genuinely matters. But the failures in this essay share a common feature, and it isn’t pragmatism. It’s that leadership optimized for the destination and forgot to check whether the road could hold.

Everything a modern society does to feed, heat, and heal its people sits on top of energy.

The applause fades. The grid either holds or it doesn’t.

Sources and Inspiration

Monuments to Tolerated Error

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:47:49 GMT

In November 2024, California voters approved Proposition 36, increasing criminal penalties for theft and drug offenses. The measure passed with 70% support. It reversed much of Proposition 47, which California voters had approved ten years earlier with 60% support.

No committee deliberated. No amendments were offered. No one sat in a room and said, “What if we toughened some penalties but not others? What about the drug treatment provisions: can we keep those while addressing the theft problem?” The question was binary. Yes or no. The voters spoke. The nuance didn’t.

This is how we govern now. Through the clean binary of the referendum. Thumbs up. Thumbs down. I picture Commodus.

The legislature is too slow, too captured, too compromised. So we go around it. We take the question directly to the people.

It feels like more democracy, maybe. It is less republic.

The founders were specific about the distinction.

Madison, in Federalist 10, designed the republic explicitly to resist what he called the “violence of faction”: the tendency of passionate majorities to steamroll minorities and mistake collective feeling for collective wisdom. His solution was to refine popular will. Pass it “through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

Madison worried about both directions. Minority factions could capture the machinery of government and obstruct from within (the filibuster, the committee bottleneck, the organized interest that blocks what most people want). We see this everywhere now: small, disciplined groups wielding procedural tools to veto what majorities support. The frustration with this obstruction is bubbling up, and it’s one reason people reach for the referendum. If the legislature won’t act, go around it.

But Madison understood something we keep forgetting: opinion and judgment are different things. Opinion is what I think right now, based on what I know, colored by what I feel. Judgment is what emerges when opinion meets counter-argument, competing evidence, and the discipline of having to govern the consequences. The answer to minority obstruction is to fix the deliberative process, not to abandon it.

The representative doesn’t just carry the people’s opinion to the capitol. The representative deliberates. Sits in committee with the opposition. Hears what the other district needs. Amends the proposal. Finds the version that addresses the problem without creating three new ones. The deliberation is the point. It’s where raw opinion gets refined into judgment through the friction of competing perspectives.

Burke made this even sharper. Speaking to his constituents in Bristol in 1774, he told them something no modern politician would dare: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

The representative who becomes a weathervane, who polls before every vote, who treats constituents’ preferences as binding instructions: this person has kept the office but abandoned the function.

The binary everywhere

Social media is a constant referendum. Every issue becomes a poll. Every position a signal. The algorithm rewards the stark binary, not the careful “it depends.” Twitter threads don’t have an amendment process. Instagram polls don’t allow counter-proposals. The format demands thumbs up or thumbs down, and we’ve internalized the format so deeply that we expect governance to work the same way.

When I look at my stats for these essays, that too is a referendum. I learn where people are willing to put their time. This essay likely won’t do well.

The revolt against institutional authority happens through tools of negation. The public can swarm, humiliate, and vote out. It cannot amend, deliberate, or build. Polling is negation dressed as participation. The information revolution gave everyone a voice, but the voice can only say yes or no. The kind of voice that says “what if we tried this instead” requires a room, a process, and time. We have less patience for all three.

Then the ballot initiatives. California has put hundreds on the ballot since establishing its initiative process in 1911. Each one reduces complex policy to a binary question. Do you want lower drug penalties? Yes or no. Do you want higher minimum wage? Yes or no. Do you want the gig economy regulated? Yes or no. Each question has a clean answer. But the clean answer has consequences the question doesn’t capture: trade-offs that only emerge in deliberation, second-order effects that nobody votes on because nobody is asked.

Prop 13 capped property taxes in 1978 and reshaped California governance for fifty years. Its consequences (funding crises in schools and local government, distorted housing markets, a shift of power from localities to Sacramento, creating a moat around certain families and not others) were not on the ballot. The question was: do you want lower property taxes? The answer was yes. The implications were a different question entirely, intense inequality, generational conflicts, and more. Nobody voted on those.

On the left, progressive ballot initiatives bypass legislatures to encode specific social visions directly into law. On the right, populist movements demand that representatives stop deliberating and start obeying. Both treat the representative as obstacle rather than tool. Both want the frictionless efficiency of direct will. The MAGA movement’s contempt for Republican moderates who “don’t fight” and the progressive left’s contempt for Democratic incrementalists who “don’t deliver” share the same structural complaint: stop deliberating and do what we want.

Same mechanism. Different content.

The school we’re closing

Tocqueville spent two years studying America and concluded that voluntary associations and local self-governance were the republic’s load-bearing walls. Citizens who join a school board, sit on a jury, negotiate with neighbors about the zoning variance: these people are practicing deliberation. They’re learning that their perspective is partial. That the other side has reasons. That the workable solution usually lives in the friction between competing interests. The township was the school of citizenship.

Take away the deliberative step, and you take away the school.

The farmer knows the land. The nurse knows the ward. The shopkeeper knows the block. A ballot initiative asks California voters to decide the fate of the state’s water policy, but the knowledge needed to make that decision well is distributed across thousands of farmers, engineers, ecologists, and municipal planners. None of it fits into a yes or no. It can only enter the system through a process where people speak, listen, amend, and compromise. Hayek called this the knowledge problem: the knowledge necessary for wise governance doesn’t live in any single person or faction. It emerges through the friction of deliberation.

Representative institutions exist because the process of debate and amendment generates insight that no poll, no referendum, no prediction market can access. Polling counts existing opinions. Deliberation produces new understanding.

Plebiscitary culture collapses a distinction the republic was built to maintain: the difference between a difference of opinion and a difference of principle. When every issue is a referendum, every disagreement becomes existential. There’s no space for “I see your reasoning but I think the trade-offs point differently.” There’s only yes or no. For or against. The capacity to treat disagreement as workable rather than threatening requires a process designed for that purpose. Referendums are designed for something else.

A society that only knows what it’s against finds plebiscitary culture suited to its needs. You can vote NO without offering an alternative. Negation scaled to governance.

I’m not arguing against citizen engagement. The founders built the republic on it. Washington and Franklin didn’t want a system designed for passive subjects. They designed one for active citizens who govern themselves through participation.

The question is what kind of participation.

Participation that submits to the discipline of deliberation (jury service, local governance, elected representation where the representative actually deliberates) builds the muscle of self-governance. It teaches us to hold our opinion alongside competing opinions and find the workable ground between them. This is hard. It’s slow. It produces outcomes that fully satisfy no one. It is also the only known process that converts raw popular will into governance that doesn’t consume itself.

Participation that bypasses deliberation (the poll, the referendum, the social media pile-on, the demand that representatives become mirrors rather than filters) feels more direct. More democratic. More responsive. But it replaces the process that generates judgment with the process that merely counts opinion. And opinion without deliberation is what Madison feared most: faction unchecked by the friction that forces it to reckon with what it doesn’t know.

The drift is real. We’re all doing it. We treat polls as mandates. We expect representatives to “fight” rather than deliberate. We reduce complex questions to binaries and call the result the voice of the people. I do it too. I catch myself wanting the clean answer, the decisive action, the leader who just does something. The patience required for deliberation feels like weakness. It isn’t. But it feels that way, and feelings are what plebiscitary culture runs on.

Back to California. In 2014, sixty percent of voters said yes to lower penalties. In 2024, seventy percent of voters said yes to higher ones. The same electorate, the same mechanism, opposite conclusions, ten years apart. No one sat in a room between those two votes and asked what changed. No one amended. No one deliberated. The people spoke twice, and the two answers canceled each other out.

Jefferson understood this better than we give him credit for.

He was the most democratic of the founders. The one who pushed hardest against Federalist caution, who trusted the people most. And in his First Inaugural, having won the most bitter election the young republic had ever seen, he said something that plebiscitary culture makes almost impossible:

“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We are all republicans: We are all federalists.”

Our disagreements about how to govern are not disagreements about whether to govern ourselves. The republic can contain differences of opinion because it has a process for working through them. That process is deliberation.

And then the less-remembered line: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.”

Monuments to the safety of tolerated error. The republic’s confidence in itself: we can afford to let wrong ideas stand because we have a process for testing them. Reason, given time and friction and the discipline of deliberation, will do its work.

Plebiscitary culture offers no such patience. It demands instant verdict. It builds guillotines of instant consensus where Jefferson would build monuments to tolerated error.

The people should govern. That was never the question. The question is whether we’re still willing to govern through the slow, maddening, indispensable process that converts what we think into something wiser than any of us thought alone.

The republic was designed to refine opinion into judgment. We are converting it back.

Sources and Inspiration

A Conflict of Visions - Thomas Sowell

The Revolt of the Public - Martin Gurri

Ex Conatu, Libertas

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:30:22 GMT

Thomas Jefferson crossed out a word and changed the meaning of freedom for two and a half centuries.

George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted weeks before Jefferson sat down to write the Declaration of Independence, listed the inherent rights: life, liberty, property, happiness, and safety. Jefferson kept life. He kept liberty. He dropped property. In its place, he elevated three words that have been misread ever since: the pursuit of happiness.

I believe I know what he meant.

Jefferson was, by his own private confession, an Epicurean. In an 1819 letter to his friend William Short, he said it plainly: “I too am an Epicurean.” He enclosed a syllabus of Epicurean doctrine, stripped to its bones:

Happiness the aim of life.
Virtue the foundation of happiness.
Utility the test of virtue.

Read those three lines slowly. Happiness is the aim. But you cannot reach it without virtue. And virtue is measured by its usefulness: its effects on the world, its contribution to others, its capacity to produce something that matters. Jefferson’s happiness was a framework for effectiveness. For producing. For participating.

He told his daughter Martha the same thing in plain language, writing from a canal boat in southern France in 1787: “A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe for felicity. The idle are the only wretched.”

The idle are the only wretched. Struggle, challenge, effort: those were the mechanisms of happiness in Jefferson’s architecture. Passivity and disengagement were its enemies.

His remaining purpose in life, he told Martha, was seeing his daughters “developing daily those principles of virtue and goodness which will make you valuable to others and happy in yourselves.” Valuable to others AND happy in yourselves. The two weren’t separate categories. Usefulness to others was the mechanism of personal happiness.

The enemy of happiness in Jefferson’s framework is not suffering. It’s what he called “the most dangerous poison of life”:

Ennui.

Passivity.

Disengagement.

Doomscrolling.

The withdrawal from useful activity that rots character from the inside.

We’ve turned his word into something he wouldn’t recognize. Happiness has become a feeling to be optimized, a mood to be managed, an arrival to be reached and defended against disturbance. We track it on apps now. Jefferson meant something closer to effective engagement with reality through virtue: being productive, being useful, developing character through activity, and through all of that, arriving at flourishing. The pursuit was the point. The happiness was in the pursuing.

The drive beneath the Declaration

There is a deeper current running beneath Jefferson’s framework, one he never named.

A century before the Declaration, Spinoza had a word for it: conatus. The fundamental drive of every being to persist in and expand its own existence. Not survival, exactly. Something more stubborn than that. A plant turning toward light isn’t deciding to grow. It just grows. Conatus is that: the core motion of a living thing, pressing outward against whatever constrains it.

And freedom, in Spinoza’s architecture, is the achieved state of acting from your own nature rather than being shoved around by external forces.

Freedom earned through understanding and effort. Never granted. Never inherited without renewal.

Ex Conatu, Libertas. From striving, freedom.

Where did Jefferson’s version come from? He may never have read Spinoza directly. The influence was atmospheric: Spinoza’s ideas passed through the radical Enlightenment and entered the intellectual air that Jefferson breathed without tracing it back. But the convergence is striking. Jefferson’s substitution of “the pursuit of happiness” for “property” shifted freedom from static possession toward active striving. His conviction that the moral sense must be exercised and cultivated, his vision of the yeoman farmer realizing capacity through self-directed labor: all of it resonates with conatus more than with Locke’s framework of natural rights.

Both men arrived at the same insight from different directions. Striving constitutes freedom. Passivity negates it.

What you can’t put in a constitution

But Jefferson made a choice that I think contains the deepest wisdom in the whole architecture.

He kept all of this privately.

His public philosophy remained Lockean: natural rights, consent of the governed, limited government as a shield against tyranny. He built institutions on Locke because institutions require bright lines. A republic must answer questions like: Where does your freedom end and mine begin? What constrains the sovereign? What rights can’t be taken away? Conatus offers no answers to these questions. It is concerned with a being’s relation to its own nature, not with the architecture of competing wills.

Some truths constrain power, bound authority, draw lines between people. A republic runs on these. A courtroom runs on these. They have to be enforceable, or they’re decoration.

Other truths shape character. They orient a person toward the world, cultivate something in them that no legal code can reach. A family runs on these. A mentor runs on these. They work precisely because no one is forced to follow them.

You cannot legislate striving. Try, and you get either authoritarianism (the state defining what counts as proper effort) or emptiness (a principle so abstract it constrains nothing). You cannot put conatus in a constitution. But you can build a household around it. You may, at its largest scale, create a culture of it.

A family doesn’t operate on enumerated rights. It operates on shared identity, obligation, modeling. The goal is character formation. And within that context, the claim that freedom is earned through effort, that passivity negates it, that the idle are the only wretched: these lose none of their force for being unlegislatable.

Jefferson understood this. He held one philosophy for the republic and another for himself and his household. He was right to keep them separate.

As a family creed, Ex Conatu, Libertas locates freedom in agency rather than entitlement. It tells children they are free because they pursue freedom through their own striving, choosing it each day. Not a gift. An ongoing achievement, something that can atrophy through neglect the way a muscle does.

It carries a useful severity. The person who ceases to strive has ceased to be free, regardless of how comfortable the couch is. This is a demanding standard. Deliberately. Jefferson told his daughter the idle are the only wretched. He didn’t soften it.

And it inoculates against what I think is the quiet disease of our particular moment: the slow substitution of ease for agency, of consumption for creation. I watch it in myself. The drift toward optimization, toward managing life rather than living it. The creed functions as a standing challenge. Remain an active author of your own life. Provide value. The capacity for self-governance starts in the smallest republic: the family.

This is why I named the publication what I named it. Prometheus saw humans shivering in the dark. He didn’t petition Zeus. He didn’t wait for permission. He stole fire, brought it down, and accepted the eagle as the price. That’s conatus in its mythic form: the drive to act on what you know, to bring light even when the cost is visible from the start. The creed and the myth are the same argument. Striving constitutes freedom. The fire has to be carried. And the carrying is the point.

I chose these words knowing they can’t be made into law.

A creed that could be legislated would have already lost its meaning. Compelled striving is compliance. Only freely chosen effort constitutes what Spinoza meant, what Jefferson practiced, what I want my children to understand about what it means to be free.

Some truths belong to the household. They enrich the individual and shape the family, and they fall apart the moment you try to enforce them on strangers with no shared context. Jefferson knew this. He built bright lines for the republic and kept his Epicurean notebooks for himself.

Ex Conatu, Libertas. From striving, freedom. The philosopher’s private conviction. The patriarch’s standing challenge.

A mind always employed is always happy. The idle are the only wretched. I believe this. I want my children to believe it too. Not because I told them. Because they felt it: the moment you realize your own capacity, the weight you can carry, the thing you built that wasn’t there before. That feeling is the freedom. Once you’ve had it, comfort stops being enough.

That’s the creed’s final demand. Even its acceptance must be earned.

Sources and Inspiration

Ethics - Baruch Spinoza

The Paralysis of the Over-Aware

Daniel Hatke — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:47:14 GMT

I can see it happening in real time now.

My inner workings can be insufferable, but let me paint a while.

Someone at dinner says something about the news, and before they’ve finished the sentence I’ve already catalogued it: preference falsification (they’re performing a belief for the table), shadow projection (the outrage says more about their anxieties than the story), entertainment epistemology (they encountered the event as spectacle, not information). I can name every mechanism operating in the room. The tribal signaling. The quiet conformity. The way certainty substitutes for thinking.

I name all of it. And then I take another bite of penne alla vodka and say nothing.

This is supposed to be the payoff. You read the books. You internalize the frameworks. You learn to see the escape mechanisms that Erich Fromm mapped in 1941: how people flee freedom through authoritarianism, through destructiveness, through what he called automaton conformity, where you adopt the beliefs and desires your culture hands you and stop noticing you’ve done it. You learn to see the way people publicly conform while privately disagreeing, performing beliefs so long they forget the original belief existed. You learn to see all of it.

And then you discover that seeing all of it changes almost nothing.

The connoisseur of dysfunction

Fromm described three escape routes from the burden of freedom. Two are dramatic: submission to authority, destruction of what threatens you. The third is quiet. Automaton conformity. You adopt the personality offered by cultural patterns. You become “exactly as all others are and as they expect you to be.” The self disappears into consensus.

There’s a version of this Fromm didn’t describe, probably because it barely existed in 1941. Call it the fourth escape: the informed spectator. You don’t submit to authority. You don’t destroy. You don’t conform. You observe. You develop such a fine-grained understanding of how everyone else is fleeing freedom that you never notice you’re doing it too.

The observation becomes the escape.

I recognize this because I live in it. I can write essays about escape mechanisms and still catch myself fleeing. I can name automaton conformity and still adopt positions because my intellectual tribe holds them, discovering later that the position was borrowed rather than earned. The awareness is something. The awareness is also, by itself, insufficient.

This isn’t confined to one end of the spectrum. The educated progressive who can deconstruct every power structure but hasn’t built or maintained a single institution or business. The constitutional originalist who can recite the Federalist Papers but hasn’t attended a school board meeting in a decade. The libertarian who has read every word Hayek wrote and never organized so much as a neighborhood party. The mechanism is the same: understanding substitutes for participation. The sophistication of the analysis becomes the excuse for the absence of the action.

A tennis coach named Timothy Gallwey once described the mind as split: Self 1, the verbal critic that analyzes your grip and replays your last mistake, and Self 2, the body that already knows how to hit the ball if Self 1 would get out of the way. The over-aware are all Self 1. The diagnostic lens has become its own form of interference.

When the most aware people opt out

This would be a private problem if it stayed private.

Hannah Arendt spent years studying what happens when people fail to think. Her account of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem produced an observation that still unsettles: the catastrophic evil of the Holocaust was administered not by monsters but by ordinary people who never stopped to consider what they were doing. Eichmann coordinated deportation logistics. He organized transport schedules, attended planning conferences, issued operational directives. He was not a passive clerk. He was an active administrator of genocide who simply never stopped to consider what his efficiency was serving. The banality of evil, Arendt called it: thoughtlessness as complicity.

The over-aware represent the mirror failure. We think constantly. We think about the mechanisms, the systems, the psychological structures, the historical patterns. We scroll the news on our phone, a false sense of participation. Of knowing. And we don’t act. Or, perhaps we make a post or send a text regarding our outrage. Meanwhile, the gap left by aware people who opt out gets filled by people with fewer reservations. Some of them are building real things. Some of them are building badly, and the people best equipped to notice are sitting at dinner cataloguing mechanisms over pasta.

Arendt understood something about action that the over-aware tend to miss: action is a beginning. It arrives when you choose to begin. The thinking was never going to finish. Every birth, she wrote, is the appearance of something new in the world. Every act of genuine agency is a kind of natality: something that could not have been predicted from what came before. You don’t finish diagnosing and then start building. You build, and the building teaches you what the diagnosis couldn’t.

Phronesis only comes from doing

Aristotle drew a distinction here. There are two kinds of knowledge. Episteme is theoretical understanding: knowing that something is true and why. Phronesis is practical wisdom: knowing what to do in a particular situation, right now, with these people, under these conditions. Episteme comes from study. Phronesis comes from action.

The catch: phronesis cannot be taught. It develops only through practice. You don’t become practically wise by reading about practical wisdom. You become practically wise by doing things, getting some of them wrong, and developing the judgment that only arrives through skin in the game. Aristotle’s word for this settled disposition was hexis: knowledge that lives in your hands and your habits, not in your theories.

The over-aware have episteme to spare. They understand the mechanisms. They can trace the genealogy of every institutional failure. What they lack is hexis, the settled capacity that comes from having tried, failed, adjusted, and tried again. The only way to build it is to begin. And beginning is exactly what the over-aware have been deferring.

The anxiety is the threshold

Rollo May, a psychologist who spent his career studying people who can’t begin, saw this pattern from the therapist’s chair. Patients in postwar America came to him with everything the century promised: security, comfort, opportunity. They weren’t sick in any obvious way. They were empty. May called it “the loss of the center.” People adrift in comfort, living what he called blind momentum: going through the motions without genuine choice, their days blurring together, their opinions borrowed from their environment.

The over-aware have their own version of blind momentum. They go through the motions of analysis rather than the motions of conformity, but the “going through the motions” part is identical. The diagnosis replaces the living. The framework substitutes for the choosing.

May’s prescription: “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.” The over-aware think they’ve escaped conformity because they can see through it. But their inaction is its own conformity: the conformity of the critic class, the audience that watches and never performs. They’ve traded the conformity of borrowed beliefs for the conformity of borrowed analysis. The form changed. The surrender didn’t.

And the anxiety they feel? May would say stop treating it as a problem. Anxiety is the price of becoming. We feel it because we stand at the threshold of something we haven’t been before. The person who feels no anxiety has stopped growing.

This is the part the over-aware get backwards. They feel their anxiety and conclude they need more theory, more reading, more understanding before they can act. One more book. One more framework. One more meditation, or Xanax. One more essay that names the mechanism with sufficient precision. May would say the anxiety is the signal that the threshold is right there. The anxiety isn’t blocking the door. The anxiety is the door. Walk through it. The doing is what resolves it, because the anxiety was never a thinking problem. It is the permanent companion of freedom. You act alongside it or you don’t act at all.

And the reward for walking through? May argued it is not grim endurance. It is joy. Watch a child learning to walk. She tries, falls, gets up, tries again. Falls again. Keeps going. When she finally takes those steps, she laughs. Not because anything external has changed. Because she’s using her powers. “Joy is the affect which comes when we use our powers.”

The over-aware have been denying themselves this. They’ve been watching the child instead of walking. They have studied the biomechanics of the first step, mapped the neural pathways, read three papers on infant motor development, and written a thoughtful critique of how society undervalues the courage it takes to fall. They have done everything except stand up.

Joy is waiting on the other side of the anxiety they keep trying to resolve with more analysis. It cannot be reached from the armchair.

What it looks like when the aware act

Iris Murdoch, a philosopher who thought more carefully about attention than almost anyone in the twentieth century, argued that the moral life is not primarily about dramatic choices. It’s about the quality of one’s vision between choices. How you see the world in ordinary moments: with clarity or distortion, with generosity or suspicion, with attention to what’s actually there or attention only to your own categories. She called the ego “fat” and “relentless,” always inserting itself between the person and the real.

The over-aware have a particular form of ego: the ego of the diagnostician. The one that sees mechanisms rather than people. Categories rather than situations. The essay rather than the dinner.

Murdoch’s remedy was attention redirected: stop looking at your own reflection in the glass and look through the glass at what’s actually there. The person in front of you at dinner isn’t a bundle of mechanisms. They’re a person. The community you live in isn’t a case study in associational collapse. It’s a place where you could show up.

Every source I’ve cited in this publication was written by someone who acted. And the action came in flavors as different as the people themselves.

Michel de Montaigne, the man who invented the essay form, retreated to a tower on his family estate in the Dordogne and wrote. That was his action. Not policy. Not activism. Writing with radical honesty about his own contradictions, his fears, his digestion, his cowardice, his confusion. His famous question, “Que sais-je?” (what do I know?) was not a counsel of paralysis. It was a practice. By admitting he didn’t know, he freed himself to investigate. By investigating, he discovered. By discovering, he changed. The curiosity was the engine. Montaigne’s action was turning the diagnostic lens on himself and publishing what he found, warts and all. He could have studied the human condition from a safe distance. Instead he made himself the specimen. That cost him something. It cost him the comfort of being the observer.

Hannah Arendt covered a trial in Jerusalem and told the truth about what she saw. She reported that Eichmann was not a monster but a bureaucrat, and that some Jewish leaders had cooperated with the Nazi regime. The truth cost her Gershom Scholem, one of her oldest and closest friends, who broke with her permanently. It cost her Kurt Blumenfeld, her mentor, who rejected her and died without reconciling. It cost her years of public attack from communities she had belonged to her entire adult life. Her action was judgment exercised in public, with consequences she accepted and could not have fully predicted. She could have stayed in the audience.

She chose the stage.

Fromm practiced psychoanalysis: one patient at a time, in a room, trying to help a specific person face their specific escape mechanisms. Eric Hoffer worked the San Francisco docks for more than twenty years and wrote philosophy in his spare time. Benjamin Franklin built a lending library, a fire company, a postal system, a university, a nation. He didn’t theorize about civic association. He built civic associations.

These actions share a common structure, and it isn’t scale. Montaigne in his tower and Franklin in his city were doing the same thing at different volumes: beginning something, with skin in the game, where they could be wrong. Montaigne could be wrong about himself. Franklin could be wrong about the nation. Arendt could be wrong about Eichmann (many thought she was). The action required what the analysis didn’t: exposure to consequences.

Aristotle would recognize every one of these as phronesis in formation. You cannot think your way into acting. You can only act your way into a different relationship with thinking. The hexis, the settled practical wisdom, develops through contact with the real. Montaigne’s essays got better because he kept writing them. Franklin’s institutions got better because he kept testing them. Arendt’s judgment got sharper because she kept exercising it in public, under fire.

Back to the dinner table

The over-aware already have confronted the hardest part: they see clearly (at least, they think they do). What they haven’t done is pick the form their action takes. For some it will be writing. For some, building. For some, showing up to a local board meeting and staying past the first hour. For some, the hardest action of all: saying what they actually think at the dinner table instead of cataloguing what everyone else thinks.

Someone brings up the latest outrage. The mechanisms are visible, as always. The preference falsification, the shadow projection, the borrowed certainty. I can see all of it.

This time I put down the fork.

I say something. Not the full diagnostic, not the framework, not the essay. Something smaller and more honest: that I’m not sure the outrage matches what actually happened, and that I’ve noticed we all seem to agree on things at this table that I’m not sure we’d agree on privately. It’s clumsy. It lands wrong. So I move to curiosity. I ask whether anyone else at the table has noticed the gap between what we say here and what we might say privately. Whether any of us are actually sure, or just performing certainty because the silence would be worse.

The awareness doesn’t save the moment. That’s the thing May tried to tell us. The anxiety doesn’t resolve before you act. It resolves, if it resolves at all, somewhere on the other side. The doing is graceless. The phronesis isn’t there yet. It won’t be there until I’ve done this enough times to develop the hexis, the settled habit of speaking honestly in rooms where honesty isn’t the norm.

But the penne alla vodka tastes different when you’re not hiding behind the observation. The vodka sauce has blossomed, or maybe it’s the adrenaline. There is something on the other side of the analysis: the small, startled recognition that you are using your powers. That you are, for the first time in a while, actually in the room.

May called it joy. I’d call it something quieter than that, in this context. Relief, maybe. The relief of no longer performing the role of the person who sees everything and does nothing.

The civic square is emptier than it should be. The people most capable of seeing what’s needed are the same ones sitting in the audience, cataloguing the performance.

The show doesn’t need more critics.

Sources and Inspiration

Man’s Search for Himself - Rollo May

The Inner Game of Tennis - Timothy Gallwey

Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt

The Sovereignty of Good - Iris Murdoch

Essays - Michel de Montaigne

The Tab

Daniel Hatke — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:36:09 GMT

Louis C.K. had a bit about watching a man on a plane lose his mind the moment the in-flight Wi-Fi went out. The guy had been connected for just minutes. Before that, the technology didn’t exist on planes. And now he was furious, as if something had been taken from him. Louis’s line was something like: “How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago.”

That’s the speed of it. The provision appears, becomes normal, becomes atmosphere, and then its absence becomes an outrage. Minutes. That’s all it takes for a miracle to become a minimum expectation.

I think about this every time something breaks that I didn’t know was working. The cell signal I notice only when it drops. The package tracking I check twelve times and then curse when it’s late. The flight itself, the metal tube hurtling six miles above the earth, which I ignore entirely, so I can be angry about the Wi-Fi or running out of snacks for my kid only 20% into the flight time. The provision is so seamless that it becomes invisible. And invisible provision does something dangerous to the person receiving it: it erases the awareness that anyone is providing at all.

For seventy-five years, the United States has been providing the Wi-Fi. Across the global commons: shipping lanes, energy corridors, dollar-denominated trade, the financial plumbing that makes international commerce function. The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet wasn’t a favor anyone asked for, at least not out loud. It was infrastructure. Background. The way shipping in the mideast lanes works.

The Strait of Hormuz was open the way water comes from a tap. You don’t think about the municipal system that delivers it until the pipe breaks.

Now the pipe has broken. And the sober objection needs to be stated right here: the United States broke it. In February 2026, joint U.S.-Israeli strikes hit Iran, killing its Supreme Leader. Iran retaliated by closing the Strait. Commercial traffic dropped 95% within weeks. Oil prices surged past $110 a barrel, up more than 60% in a month. And then Donald Trump told European and British leaders, in effect, to go handle it themselves. He posted on Truth Social: “Go get your own oil.” He told the UK to “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.”

Two versions of this story circulate, and both are correct. One says Trump started the fire and is now demanding that everyone else put it out. The other says the fire revealed that Europe has no fire department. If Europe had the capability to secure Hormuz independently, the question of who lit the match would be tactical (an argument about strategy). The question is existential because they can’t. Macron said forcibly opening the Strait was “unrealistic.” These are nations that ran down their hard-power capabilities for decades, secure in the assumption that American ships would always appear over the horizon.

The fire caught a house with no extinguisher, no alarm system, and no evacuation plan. Who struck the match matters. That the house had no sprinklers matters more.

Forgot, or Never Learned

The question worth sitting with is why the sprinklers were never installed.

Freedom is psychologically expensive. It demands you tolerate uncertainty, bear responsibility, build capacity you may never need. This is true for individuals. It is also true for nations. When someone else carries the weight of your security, you don’t just benefit from the arrangement. You stop perceiving the weight as weight. You mistake the absence of burden for the natural order of things. The guarantee becomes atmosphere. You breathe it without thinking.

And here’s what makes it worse: the better the guarantor, the deeper the sleep. A malevolent protector creates awareness. You feel the boot. You know you’re dependent because the dependency chafes every day. If Iran were providing Europe’s security, no European would mistake the arrangement for freedom. The coercion would be visible, and so would the chains. But a benevolent protector, a competent one, a generous one, produces something more dangerous than resentment. It produces oblivion. The provision is so reliable, so seamless, that it vanishes into the background of reality. You don’t notice the weight being carried because the carrier never complains and never drops it. Until they do.

This isn’t an argument that the United States should have been worse at the job. It’s an observation that doing the job well, for long enough, without asking anything in return, produces the same incapacity as coercion. Just without the awareness.

Erich Fromm identified this mechanism in 1941, watching Europe burn from American exile. His question wasn’t how dictators seize power. It was why populations hand it over. His answer: freedom creates anxiety. The burden of self-provision, of standing alone, of making choices no one else can validate, produces a discomfort that most people will do almost anything to escape. When someone else is providing, the anxiety never surfaces. The dependent party doesn’t feel dependent. They feel normal.

Alexis de Tocqueville saw the endpoint two centuries before Fromm named the mechanism. He described a power that “does not tyrannize, but compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” Tocqueville was writing about soft despotism, the paternalistic state that infantilizes through comfort rather than coercion. But the mechanism works the same way with a paternalistic ally. Provide for every need long enough, and the recipient loses the capacity to provide for themselves. Not because they’re shortsighted. Because the muscle was never asked to flex.

Forgot implies institutional memory that can be recovered. Never learned means building from scratch under crisis conditions. The postwar European political class largely inherited the American guarantee at birth. They didn’t choose dependency. They were born into a world where someone else was already paying the tab. The anxiety Fromm described never had to surface. The safety net was always there. Childhood was the only condition they knew, and childhood feels like freedom until someone asks you to feed yourself.

The Outrage Is the Tell

Eric Hoffer spent his life on the docks of San Francisco, watching who joined movements and why. His uncomfortable conclusion: the content of the doctrine is almost irrelevant. What matters is what the movement offers the convert. Someone to blame. Something to be. The costume differs left and right; the function is identical.

Hoffer’s insight applies here in a way he might not have anticipated. The dependent party doesn’t just accept the dependency silently. They convert it into moral superiority. Europe didn’t merely free-ride on American naval power. It disdained that power while sheltering under it. Green posturing, anti-militarist rhetoric, multilateral virtue-signaling: all delivered from the safety of someone else’s security guarantee. The disdain is the tell. It functions the way Hoffer’s true believer relates to the society that sustains them: needing it, resenting it, performing the resentment as proof of moral purity.

And it’s happening inside America too.

On the left: the anti-capitalist organizer coordinating via iPhone, posting on a venture-backed platform, collecting speaking fees at universities whose endowments are invested in the markets they denounce. Noam Chomsky built his career at MIT, one of the Pentagon’s largest research partners, arguing that the military-industrial complex was America’s defining sin. I’m not saying the critique is wrong. I’m saying the critique was funded by the thing it critiqued, and nobody talked about that part. That silence suggests something closer to a power calculus than an honest reckoning.

On the right: seven or eight of the ten most federally dependent states (depending on the year measured) vote Republican. Three-quarters of FEMA disaster relief goes to red states. Cliven Bundy denied federal authority while ranching on federal land at a 93% discount to private market rates. He could not ranch without the system he rejected. The Ayn Rand Institute, devoted to laissez-faire capitalism, accepted $713,000 in forgivable government loans during Covid. They wrote a blog post explaining why it was fine.

(I’m aware I’m listing these with the detachment of someone who thinks he’s above the pattern. I’m not. I’ll get there.)

Neither side sees it. And this is the part I want to deliver: what’s operating here is self-deception. Hypocrisy would require knowing you’re doing it. The Bundy rancher genuinely does not experience himself as a federal beneficiary. The anti-military academic genuinely does not experience herself as sheltered by military power. The European diplomat genuinely does not experience his green-energy sermon as delivered from the deck of someone else’s diesel-powered destroyer, projecting power against adversaries who would willingly take or destroy the freedom he’s exercising to give the sermon in the first place.

Jean-Paul Sartre called this mauvaise foi. Bad faith. You deceive yourself about your own situation so completely that the deception disappears into the furniture of your worldview. You don’t see it because seeing it would require dismantling the story you tell about who you are.

It disturbs one’s identity.

The Fish Doesn’t Know It’s in Water

The tab at Hormuz is the visible line item. The bill underneath is larger.

The dependency isn’t just military. It’s the entire operating system. Dollar-denominated trade. Treasury recycling. Shipping insurance. Correspondent banking. The clearing mechanisms and compliance layers through which value moves across borders. The architecture that turns a handshake in Dubai into a settled transaction in Frankfurt. All of it runs on American infrastructure. The U.S. didn’t just protect the shipping lanes. It built the lanes. And the ports. And the currency everyone uses when they arrive.

F.A. Hayek called the underlying principle the knowledge problem: the information required to coordinate a complex system is so dispersed, so embedded in local circumstances and tacit practice, that no one can perceive it as a whole, let alone replicate it. Hayek was writing about economies and central planning. But the insight scales. The global operating system that American power underwrites is so distributed that most participants can’t see it as a product of anyone’s effort. It’s just how trade works. How shipping works. How money works.

Until it doesn’t. Iran has established a toll on Larak Island. The IRGC screens every vessel: IMO number, cargo manifest, destination, crew list, ownership details. All submitted to intermediaries linked to the Revolutionary Guard. Two million dollars per transit, payable in yuan or cryptocurrency. Some Chinese-linked vessels have been turned back even after paying. The distributed order that Hayek described (too complex and embedded in local practice for anyone to administer) is being replaced by somebody vetting paperwork in a harbor office on an island most people couldn’t find on a map. It is already failing. But the damage to the old system doesn’t require the new one to succeed.

Deutsche Bank strategist Mallika Sachdeva warned this could be “the catalyst for erosion in petrodollar dominance and the beginnings of the petroyuan.” Speculative, maybe. Except that sanctioned Iranian and Russian oil already accounts for roughly thirteen million barrels per day (about fourteen percent of global supply), and most of it has traded outside dollar rails for years. The alternative infrastructure already exists. Hormuz is testing whether a crisis can force it to scale.

The water is draining. And the fish are starting to notice what air feels like.

David McCullough spent decades reconstructing the American founding. The through-line of his work is contingency: nothing about the arrangement was inevitable. The fog over the East River that allowed Washington’s army to escape Brooklyn. The crossing of the Delaware that kept the war alive. Every institution, every alliance, every guarantee was a contingent choice that could have gone differently. The postwar generation inherited a world of American guarantees and treated them the way fish treat water. Not a gift. Not a decision someone made. Just the medium of existence.

In July 1969, Richard Nixon held an informal press briefing in Guam and told Asian allies they would need to provide their own ground forces. Australia heard the message and began rebuilding its defense posture around self-reliance. But the word “began” is doing a lot of work. The first articulated self-reliance policy didn’t appear until the 1976 Defence White Paper, seven years after Nixon’s announcement. The full doctrine wasn’t codified until the 1987 white paper. Eighteen years. Every Australian defence white paper since has debated the same unresolved question: how much weight for the alliance versus how much for self-reliance. Forty years on, they’re still calibrating. It worked because Australia had latent capacity, strong institutions, and nearly two decades of peace in which to build. The withdrawal was calibrated, not chaotic. The umbrella was pulled back slowly enough for the person underneath to find their own roof. That timeline matters for what follows.

When the U.S. left the Philippines in 1992, there was no calibration and no time. In February 1995, just over two years later, a Filipino navy patrol found a newly built octagonal structure on stilts flying a Chinese flag on a submerged reef, two hundred and forty kilometers off the island of Palawan. A Filipino fisherman had reported being taken captive by Chinese soldiers. Beijing said the structure was a shelter for its fishermen. It was equipped with a satellite dish linked to the Chinese mainland. Today Mischief Reef is a fully fledged Chinese military outpost: a three-thousand-meter airfield, radar arrays, and probable surface-to-air missile installations built on land reclaimed from the sea. The fisherman’s shelter became a forward operating base. By 1998, the Philippines signed the Visiting Forces Agreement to get American forces back. The dependent party didn’t build. The vacuum filled. And then the dependent party asked the provider to return.

And then there’s China. More than 40% of China’s oil imports transit the Strait of Hormuz. Belt and Road stretches across three continents. Artificial islands bristle with radar and runways in the South China Sea. This is a nation that has spent two decades signaling that it is ready to be a superpower.

Hormuz is the exam. And so far, China’s answer has been a toll booth on Larak Island: collect fees in yuan, wave ships through selectively, let the IRGC do the muscle work. A toll booth without a road crew. Even Chinese-linked vessels (the ships of the one major power paying in the preferred currency) have been turned back at the chokepoint. Someone has to dredge the mines, enforce the rules of engagement, absorb the casualties, manage the diplomatic overhead of being the power everyone resents. The US has done this for seventy-five years. China has watched. Watching and doing are different things, and the difference is measured in blood, treasure, and the willingness to be hated for showing up. The tab comes due for aspiring superpowers too.

Europe sits somewhere between these outcomes, and nobody knows which way it tips. France deployed ten warships to the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea, including the nuclear-powered Charles de Gaulle carrier group, retasked from operations near Sweden after an Iranian drone struck RAF Akrotiri on March 1. That means France chose the Middle East over the Baltic. Half the French surface fleet, deployed to a crisis zone, other commitments left exposed. France is preparing escort missions for merchant ships through Hormuz and has dedicated frigates to the EU’s Operation Aspides.

France can do this because France resisted. In 1966, de Gaulle withdrew from NATO’s integrated military command to preserve French strategic autonomy. Against explicit American opposition. France kept independent nuclear capability and a blue-water navy when every incentive pointed toward letting Washington carry the weight. That tradition exists because one leader said no while the architecture of dependency was being built around him. Everyone else said yes. France is the only European nation that chose to keep a navy capable of projecting power at this scale.

The UK convened forty nations to discuss collectively reopening the Strait. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper chaired the meeting: representatives from France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the UAE, Bahrain, Australia, and more than thirty others. Forty foreign ministers in a room, trying to build the fire department that should have existed decades ago. The next stage: military planners meeting to discuss mine-clearing operations and a reassurance force for commercial shipping. Not just diplomacy. Operational planning. The fire department is being designed in the middle of the fire.

The United States didn’t attend. Trump said it wasn’t America’s responsibility. The man who lit the match declined the invitation to discuss the fire. Whatever strategic logic you credit him with — and I’ve tried to be fair about the argument that the fire revealed a house with no sprinklers — refusing to show up when your allies are trying to respond is a stain on the strategy. You can argue that Europe needs to stand on its own. You can even argue that a crisis was the only thing that would force it. But you cannot start the crisis, demand others handle it, and then not show up when they try. That isn’t tough love. It’s abandonment dressed as doctrine.

The ReArm Europe plan envisions eight hundred billion euros in new defense investment. The number deserves scrutiny. Six hundred and fifty billion comes from suspended EU budget rules: permission for member states to reallocate spending they already have. Not new funding. The remaining hundred and fifty billion is a loan instrument called SAFE. And the plan was announced in March 2025, a full year before the Hormuz crisis. The reckoning was already underway before Trump lit the match. What Hormuz did was expose the gap between the plan’s timeline and reality. ReArm Europe targets four years. If Australia needed eighteen years after the Nixon Doctrine to fully articulate its self-reliance posture (with latent capacity, strong institutions, and no active crisis), four years is ambition dressed as strategy. The crisis operates on a timeline of weeks.

The honest position is that the dependency was real, the reckoning was overdue, and the outcome is genuinely unresolved. The person who lit the match and the person who never bought a fire extinguisher both have something to answer for. Assigning blame for the fire doesn’t rebuild the house.

But the honest position has a layer beneath it that makes both parties more uncomfortable than either wants to be.

Who Kept the Lights Off

The dependency was designed. Fromm’s anxiety mechanism explains part of it, but only part. For decades, American strategists understood something simpler: a Europe that depends on Washington for security is a Europe that follows Washington’s lead. When West Germany began military cooperation with France in the early 1960s, Kennedy threatened to pull every American soldier off the continent. An independent European defense posture would end what the United States called its “preponderant position” in the alliance. That was the real threat. Washington wanted the dependency. It kept the lights off on purpose.

This doesn’t excuse the dependency. Europe had agency and chose comfort. (Choosing comfort is still choosing.) But it reframes the outrage. When American voices now demand that Europe stand on its own, they are demanding something that American policy actively discouraged for sixty years. The house has no sprinklers partly because the fire department told them sprinklers weren’t necessary.

And yet. The world of 1985 no longer exists. The strategic calculus that made European dependency useful to Washington (containing the Soviet Union, maintaining NATO coherence, preventing the emergence of a rival European power center) dissolved with the Berlin Wall and hasn’t applied since. What served American interests during the Cold War is counterproductive in 2026. A Europe that can’t secure its own shipping lanes is a strategic liability. The architecture of dependency was designed for a world that vanished thirty-five years ago. The design is obsolete. The dependency it produced is not.

Both truths coexist. Neither cancels the other. And neither makes the reckoning optional.

There is a second force making the reckoning harder, and it doesn’t originate in any capital that claims to be an ally.

The realist argument has been losing ground for years: that Europe must build hard-power capacity, that dependency is dangerous, that the liberal order requires actual defense. All true.

Since at least 2014, Russian information operations have framed NATO as an instrument of American imperialism rather than a defensive alliance. The messaging is tailored for every audience. To the European far-left, Russia fights Western imperialism and colonial overreach. To the far-right, it offers nationalist sovereignty against Brussels technocrats. Different costumes, same function. Hoffer would recognize the structure instantly. The content of the doctrine is irrelevant. What matters is what it offers the convert: a reason to do nothing and feel righteous about it. A hundred and fifty suspected hybrid incidents linked to Russia were documented across the EU in 2025 alone. AI-generated content is making the next round cheaper by the day.

China’s approach is quieter but the structure is the same. Belt and Road builds ports and railways. It also builds a story: American-led order is declining, alternatives exist, “multipolarity” means freedom from Western dominance. (Whether it means submission to a different kind goes unmentioned.) Chinese strategists talk about winning the “three warfares” (public opinion, psychological pressure, legal positioning) long before any shooting starts. The goal is erosion. Convince enough people that American leadership is optional and the architecture starts to crumble whether anyone replaces it or not. The Larak Island toll booth is the physical version of this. The narrative is the psychological version.

The audience most susceptible is the population Fromm described: people exhausted by complexity, suspicious of institutions, hungry for someone to explain why the world feels broken. The anti-imperialist narrative, the anti-change narrative, the reflexive suspicion of any argument that says we need to build or defend or maintain anything at all. It offers what every escape mechanism offers: relief from the burden of seeing clearly. I’ve watched it work in my own feed. Someone shares a carefully sourced argument about European defense capacity waning and the first reply is something about imperialism or some other western shame. The conversation dies there. It was designed to die there. The platforms reward the reply because outrage travels faster than analysis, and the realist argument ends up sounding like warmongering to people who have never had to think about where their security comes from.

This is the same mechanism, running through one more channel. The provision was invisible. The dependency was invisible. And now the information environment designed to keep people from seeing the dependency is itself invisible — the most seamless provision of all.

I said I’d get to myself. Here.

Where in my own life have I mistaken someone else’s effort for the natural order of things? Where have I converted my dependence into a story about my own independence? I’d rather not answer that. Which is probably the answer. But an honest answer for most of us is somewhere in our relationship with our parents.

Me included. It is all too easy to look around in your teens and see others who have more, whether material or experience. The will to compare is intense. You’re actively trying to figure out not only who you are, but where you stand. In that fog of hormones and half-formed frontal lobes, you can misunderstand the nature of the water you swim in. Once you begin signing your own leases, taking your own risks, and being the backstop to others your whole perspective shifts. Moving to New York City meant my backstop was gone. Luckily, I had some stellar friends who helped elevate me. When they left, I did the same for others.

The Wi-Fi on the plane, the shipping lane at Hormuz, the invisible labor in every family where one person absorbs the cost while everyone else discusses fairness: the mechanism is the same at every scale. And the first sign that the reckoning has arrived is always the same. Not self-reflection. Not gratitude. Outrage. Because the provision was load-bearing, and acknowledging it means acknowledging what we can’t do alone, and what it actually costs to try.

The Wi-Fi has become atmosphere. We just never asked who was paying for it.

Sources and Inspiration

The Image - Daniel Boorstin

1776 - David McCullough

The Signaler-in-Chief

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:12:15 GMT

A man walks into the Four Seasons in a ragged flannel shirt. Another walks into a Best Western wearing a Rolex. We might call the first humble and the second flashy, but that misses what’s actually happening. Both are signaling. The flannel says “I’m so wealthy I don’t need to dress the part.” The Rolex says “I’m successful even if my surroundings don’t reflect it.” Neither is more authentic than the other. Both are performances calibrated to an audience.

I don’t think this is a problem. Humans signal. We always have. The question is whether we know we’re doing it. Some of us are aware of our performances and make peace with them. Some deny they’re performing at all, which is cause for introspection. Some genuinely don’t care how they’re perceived and just wear what’s comfortable (though this is rarer than we like to think).

But there’s a fourth category that’s become dominant in public life: people who have become so skilled at signaling that they’ve lost the capacity to do anything else. People whose entire competence lies in reading the room and delivering what the room wants to hear.

We’ve started electing these people. And then we wonder why they can’t govern.

Keir Starmer won a landslide in July 2024. By December, his approval rating had collapsed to 18% favorable, 72% unfavorable. That’s roughly where Boris Johnson sat on his resignation day. A historic victory evaporated in months.

What happened?

Watch the mechanism. In 2020, Starmer needed left-wing Labour members to win the party leadership. So he published ten pledges: abolish tuition fees, nationalize rail and utilities, defend free movement with the EU, raise taxes on the top 5%, end the “cruel” two-child benefit cap. He positioned himself as Jeremy Corbyn’s natural heir, promising to “maintain our radical values.”

He won the leadership.

Then he needed media support and centrist votes to win the general election. So he abandoned every pledge. Tuition fees rose. Nationalization plans were attacked as “Corbyn-style” overreach. Free movement was ruled out; he started using “take back control,” the Brexit slogan he’d spent years opposing. The two-child cap remained; he suspended seven Labour MPs who voted against it.

Two audiences. Two sets of signals. Zero continuity of substance.

The Gaza example shows the pattern even more starkly. In October 2023, Starmer said Israel had the “right” to cut off water and electricity to Gaza. He called a ceasefire something that would “embolden” Hamas. When 56 Labour MPs defied him to vote for a ceasefire, he sacked ten frontbenchers rather than shift position. Then, once the political winds changed, he shifted. By February 2024, he was demanding the “fighting must stop now.” He adopted the position he’d punished others for holding, and acted as though it had been his view all along.

His skill is reading the room. That skill got him the job. But governing requires a different skill: making decisions that disappoint people, absorbing unpopularity for necessary choices, holding a position even when the room turns against you. Starmer has cycled through four directors of communications in nineteen months. The tool that works for acquiring power breaks when you try to use it for wielding power.

Same mechanism, different costume

The pattern isn’t confined to the British left.

In 2016, JD Vance called Donald Trump “America’s Hitler.” He wrote that Trump’s promises were “the needle in America’s collective vein,” that Trump was “cultural heroin.” He called him “reprehensible” for his rhetoric on immigrants and Muslims. He described himself as “a Never Trump guy” and reportedly voted for Evan McMullin rather than cast a ballot for Trump.

By 2022, Vance was running for Senate in Ohio. He deleted the critical tweets. He apologized publicly: “I regret being wrong about the guy.” He became, in the words of reporters covering him, “one of Trump’s fiercest defenders.” In 2024, Trump selected him as his running mate.

Vance’s explanation for the reversal is that he “bought into media lies” about Trump. This requires believing that he was completely deceived about a man’s character in 2016, then completely correct by 2022, with the timing of his enlightenment perfectly matching his political ambitions. The simpler explanation: the room changed, and Vance adjusted his signal accordingly. I don’t know what Vance actually believes. I’m not sure he does either.

The content differs entirely from Starmer. One is British Labour, courting progressives then abandoning them. One is American right-wing, opposing Trump then embracing him. But the mechanism is identical. Both men read their respective rooms with precision. Both delivered whatever signals would advance them with whichever audience they needed at that moment. Both are fluent in the language of conviction without the inconvenience of actual convictions.

Vance hasn’t been tested by governance yet — Starmer has. The results aren’t encouraging.

We might want to blame the politicians. But Starmer and Vance didn’t emerge from nowhere. They were selected. Someone selected them.

We did.

But the selection isn’t just bad judgment. It’s structural. Neil Postman observed that the medium shapes what kind of person can succeed within it. Print culture could reward the deliberator: someone who builds an argument across paragraphs, tolerates complexity, changes minds through sustained reasoning. Performance media cannot. The camera demands presence, timing, the compression of everything into moments. A politician who pauses to think looks weak. One who says “it’s complicated” looks evasive. The medium eliminates the deliberator from the pool, because deliberation on camera is indistinguishable from hesitation.

What the system produces instead is what Daniel Boorstin called the human pseudo-event: a figure whose public image exists for media consumption, skilled primarily at appearing skilled. The celebrity replacing the hero. Starmer’s ten pledges weren’t convictions communicated through media. They were performances calibrated to the medium carrying them. So was Vance’s reversal.

The genuine article (someone who knows what they think, says it clearly, holds the position even when costly) is at a disadvantage in this system. They’ll say the wrong thing. They’ll refuse to pivot when the room shifts. They’ll accumulate enemies by standing for something specific.

The signalers, meanwhile, glide upward. They read every room correctly. They never alienate anyone permanently because they never commit to anything permanently. They seem like leaders right up until the moment leadership is required.

We vote the way they campaign

But the problem runs deeper than who gets elected. What Timur Kuran called preference falsification (saying what we think we’re supposed to believe until we forget what we actually believed) doesn’t stop at conversation. We don’t just tell pollsters what sounds good while believing something different. We do it at the ballot box. We cast votes that make us feel like good people rather than votes that reflect our judgment. We signal with our votes the same way Starmer signals with his pledges.

Think about how often political opinions are expressed not as reasoning but as identity markers. “I could never vote for X” functions less as policy analysis and more as tribal declaration: I am the kind of person who would never do that. The vote becomes a performance of virtue rather than an expression of preference. And once voting becomes signaling, the system dutifully produces candidates who are excellent at receiving signals and reflecting them back.

There are exceptions. Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times and absorbed years of professional and social cost for expressing heterodox views. J.K. Rowling has spent half a decade as a target for voicing positions on gender that, polls suggest, most people privately share but few will publicly defend. Bill Maher has been telling the same jokes for thirty years and watched himself migrate from liberal provocateur to something the left now codes as conservative, without changing many positions. That all three names register as “right-coded” says more about the drift than about them. These are people who broke from the feedback loop, who stopped falsifying their preferences and accepted the consequences.

Most of us won’t do this. I understand why. The cost is real. I feel the pull myself: the temptation to express the acceptable view, to vote the way that won’t require explanation at dinner parties, to signal membership in the right tribe rather than voice the judgment forming in my own mind. Signaling is comfortable. Conviction is expensive.

And the corruption runs in both directions. Falsified preferences produce signalers. Those signalers reinforce which preferences it’s safe to express. Starmer’s pledge reversals taught Labour members what convictions actually cost. Vance’s reversal taught Republican aspirants what loyalty requires. Each cycle narrows the range of expressible belief, which narrows the range of viable candidates, which narrows further still.

What would happen if we voted the way we actually believe? Not the view that makes us feel virtuous. Not the tribal declaration. The judgment we’d express if no one were watching.

If we keep selecting signalers (and we keep selecting them because we vote as signalers ourselves) we’ll keep getting governments that perform rather than govern. The feedback loop is tight: we falsify our preferences, the system reads our falsified preferences, and it produces leaders optimized for the false signal rather than the true one.

Every signal we send, the system receives. It is listening very carefully.

Sources and Inspiration

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman

Private Truths, Public Lies - Timur Kuran

A Conflict of Visions - Thomas Sowell

Into the Forge of Both Sides-ism

Daniel Hatke — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:24:44 GMT

Both sides have radicalized. Both sides are extreme. Both sides are the problem.

This is the responsible position, the one you take when you want to sound thoughtful without getting into a fight. I held it for years. It felt fair, measured, the kind of thing a serious person says at dinner without anyone needing to push back. You critique the right’s populism and the left’s institutional capture in the same breath, everybody nods, nobody feels accused or attacked, necessarily.

The data doesn’t cooperate. But the more interesting question turned out to be why the comfortable frame made it so hard to see.

I’ve rewritten this eight times, attempting to thread this needle.

Timur Kuran is an economist who noticed something strange about revolutions: they seem to come from nowhere. The Soviet system looked stable, then collapsed. The Shah seemed secure, then fell in weeks. His explanation was preference falsification. People misrepresent their private beliefs under social pressure, publicly affirming what they privately doubt. When everyone falsifies, no one knows what anyone actually believes. Public opinion becomes a hall of mirrors.

Kuran’s deeper discovery was what happens over time. If you spend long enough publicly affirming positions you privately question, you start to forget you ever questioned them. The performance overwrites the private belief. Preference falsification doesn’t just hide what people think. Given enough time, it destroys what people think.

I bring this up before the data, before the politics, because the “both sides” frame is itself a species of preference falsification. We say “both sides are the problem” not because we’ve examined the evidence and found symmetry, but because symmetric blame is socially safe. It doesn’t require choosing. It doesn’t invite accusation. And we’ve been performing it so long that many of us have forgotten there was ever a question to examine.

When you look past the frame, the picture isn’t symmetric.

In 2017, Pew Research published a study tracking ten core political values from 1994 to 2017. The median Democrat shifted substantially leftward, with the sharpest acceleration after 2011. The median Republican shifted rightward, but less dramatically and more gradually. The partisan gap more than doubled.

A 2026 study from Cambridge, published in Royal Society Open Science, put a finer point on it. Analyzing American National Election Studies data from 1988 to 2024, they found the left became 31.5 percent more socially liberal. The right moved 2.8 percent more conservative. On actual policy positions across three and a half decades, one side’s center of gravity shifted dramatically. The other barely budged.

These aren’t polls about one hot-button issue. These are composite measures across the full range of policy positions: immigration, race, criminal justice, the role of government, social values.

But notice what I just did. I presented a scoreboard. And the temptation, mine included, is to read it as vindication: see, they started it. That impulse is the frame talking. The numbers matter as evidence that the “both sides” story is hiding a causal chain. They don’t matter as a final score. The mechanism underneath is what we need to see.

The engine underneath

Two visions of human nature sit beneath every political argument. Thomas Sowell mapped them in A Conflict of Visions: the constrained vision sees people as fixed and flawed, so you design systems that work despite our limits. The unconstrained vision sees people as perfectible, so you get the right arrangement and solve problems the old systems only managed.

You don’t need the labels to see which one found institutional fuel after 2008. Universities, professional credentialing, media, corporate HR: they provided the infrastructure for one vision to accelerate while the other held roughly in place. Each new norm made the previous position look retrograde, which pushed the next norm further, which made the thing that was progressive five years ago look conservative now.

But beneath the institutional machinery, something deeper was at work. Karl Popper, writing in wartime exile while watching the most educated civilization in Europe devour itself, identified what he considered the most dangerous idea in Western political thought: historicism. The belief that history moves toward a knowable destination. Once you believe you know where history is going, three things follow. Opposition becomes irrational. Present costs become acceptable. And coercion becomes a moral obligation. You’re not forcing anyone. You’re helping them arrive where they were going anyway.

“The right side of history” is the tell. It sounds like moral clarity. It functions as prophecy. And prophets don’t need consent.

Popper’s insight explains why the left’s shift was institutional rather than merely ideological. Historicism changes what institutions do. If progress has a direction, then institutions that advance that direction are doing their job, and institutions that resist it are failing. The credentialing bodies, the editorial boards, the HR departments didn’t conspire. They each, independently, aligned with what felt like the direction of history. The result was a ratchet: each turn generated pressure for the next, because standing still now meant standing on the wrong side of something inevitable.

The most striking version happened on race. Zach Goldberg, analyzing ANES data, documented something counterintuitive: between 2012 and 2020, white liberals shifted so far leftward on racial attitude measures that on several survey questions they scored more “liberal” than Black and Hispanic respondents. The people most affected by racial discrimination shifted their attitudes moderately. The people most removed from it shifted dramatically.

That inversion is hard to explain as awakening. You’d expect genuine awakening to start closest to the experience and radiate outward. This started in seminar rooms, editorial meetings, social media and propagated out.

Immigration tells the same story from a policy angle. In 2006, twenty-six Senate Democrats voted for the Secure Fence Act, including Obama and Schumer. Border security was a bipartisan position. By 2018, enforcement was cruelty. People who didn’t change their mind on immigration found the categories changing around them.

Eric Hoffer’s observation about mass movements illuminates why these shifts felt so total. The doctrine matters less than what the movement provides psychologically: belonging, identity, purpose, someone to blame. If you’re twenty-eight in a major city with a degree that isn’t producing the life you expected, a movement that offers a moral framework, a community of the righteous, and a clear enemy answers questions that career and income are failing to answer. The psychological pull and the institutional enforcement arrived together. One side’s shift had both engine and fuel. The other side’s shift hadn’t happened yet.

This doesn’t mean racism isn’t real or that border enforcement is simple. It means the fuel for these particular shifts included more than new information about race or immigration. And when the advocates move further than the people they’re advocating for, it’s worth asking who the movement is serving.

What happened next

Then the right shifted. Differently.

The Cambridge researchers who documented the 2.8 percent policy shift offered an interpretation: the right’s recent energy reflects “outgroup animosity for a perceived ‘woke’ left,” as one of the study’s authors put it, more than firm belief in extreme policy positions. The right developed new tolerances for the previously unacceptable. It didn’t develop new ideas of its own.

By 2025, only 30 percent of Republicans strongly disapproved of January 6th, down from 51 percent in 2021. By 2023, 63 percent still believed the 2020 election was stolen. Between 2022 and 2024, the share who say “health of democracy” is a critical issue fell from 51 to 32 percent. On immigration, the share who say undocumented immigrants should not be allowed to stay legally jumped from 42 to 66 percent between 2020 and 2024.

Moderate Republicans fell below 20 percent for the first time in Gallup’s tracking: 18 percent in 2024, down from the low 30s at the turn of the century. But this looks less like existing conservatives radicalizing than like moderates leaving the party. The coalition didn’t move right. It shed everyone who wasn’t already there.

I need to say something directly here, because the structure of this essay could be read as softening the right’s pathology: reactive does not mean less dangerous. Election denial is real. Institutional nihilism is dangerous. The personality cult is dangerous. A car crash caused by one driver drifting into the other lane is still a car crash. The passengers in both vehicles are equally injured. The right’s norm erosion (anti-democratic proceduralism, January 6th, the delegitimization of institutions themselves) is its own crisis, and its consequences are playing out right now.

But the right’s shift didn’t materialize from nothing. The data shows a delay, not a parallel: the left shifted through roughly 2020, and the right’s hardening accelerated after. The left’s shift was programmatic: build through institutions, capture credentialing, make the new norms load-bearing. The right’s shift was reactive: tear it down, burn it out, replace deliberation with grievance. Same psychological mechanism, the demand for certainty in the face of exhaustion, wearing different clothes.

Popper would recognize both. The historicist plans the future against the will of the open process: once you know the destination, correction becomes coercion. The authoritarian offers relief from the chaos the planning created: the exhaustion of uncertainty produces a demand for someone who will just decide. Both are enemies of the open society. But one is cause and the other is consequence, and flattening the sequence into “both sides” makes both problems harder to fix.

Why we can’t say this

Here is where Kuran’s insight becomes structural.

The Cato Institute and YouGov found in 2020 that 62 percent of Americans say the political climate prevents them from sharing their views. Self-censorship was highest among Republicans (77 percent) and independents (59 percent), but a majority of Democrats (52 percent) reported it too. More than half of Democrats don’t feel free to say what they think.

The More in Common project, in their Hidden Tribes study, identified what they called the “Exhausted Majority”: roughly two-thirds of Americans caught between the politically active wings. Progressive Activists (about 8 percent of the population) and Devoted Conservatives (about 6 percent) drive the discourse. The other 86 percent watches.

This is preference falsification at scale. And the “both sides” frame is its signature product. We default to symmetric blame because naming the sequence carries social cost. Say the left shifted first and further, and from the left you’re a right-wing apologist. Say the right’s response is genuinely dangerous, and from the right you are some type of traitor. Symmetric blame is the position that avoids both accusations.

Kuran showed that revolutions surprise everyone because the gap between public expression and private belief was invisible until it collapsed. The “both sides” frame works the same way. It feels like analysis or fairness. It functions as camouflage. Underneath it, a large majority privately suspects the symmetry story is wrong, but publicly performs it because the cost of saying so is too high.

And the deepest damage operates exactly the way Kuran predicted. Perform the frame long enough and the original question disappears. You can no longer access the observation because it’s been buried under years of diplomatic equivalence. The frame doesn’t just hide the asymmetry. It erodes your capacity to see it. Knowledge corruption, Kuran called it: falsification so prolonged that the private belief itself degrades.

In the mid-1990s, journalists at major outlets roughly matched the general population on many political attitude measures. By the 2020s, that match was gone. Newsroom surveys show dramatic leftward clustering, particularly on social and cultural issues. This isn’t conspiracy. It’s Kuran’s mechanism operating inside institutions: when everyone in the room shares the same assumptions, those assumptions stop being assumptions. They become “how things obviously are.” The person who disagrees doesn’t get silenced. They just feel increasingly off, and eventually they leave or stop talking, and the room gets more uniform, and the frame survives because the room producing it no longer contains the perspective that would challenge it.

I notice something about myself as I write this. I keep reaching for balance. Every time I name the asymmetry, the instinct fires to immediately offset it with a matching critique of the other side. The pull toward symmetric blame is strong precisely because asymmetric diagnosis invites the very social cost I described three paragraphs ago. I am performing the preference falsification I’m writing about. The frame has its hooks in me too.

You don’t fix institutional capture by asking voters to calm down. You don’t fix reactive nihilism by asking institutions to loosen up. You fix each by naming each, which requires tolerating the discomfort of saying something that will be misread by someone on every side.

The 86 percent caught between the active wings, the ones performing compliance or calling themselves independent because the alternatives require pretending: they are the open society trying to hold. And the first step in holding is refusing the frame that makes the problem invisible: seeing the sequence clearly enough to diagnose each pathology for what it is, instead of flattening both into a symmetry that comforts everyone and helps no one.

Accurate diagnosis is not partisanship. Misdiagnosis for the sake of balance is.

Sources and Inspiration

Private Truths, Public Lies - Timur Kuran

The Revolt of the Public - Martin Gurri