The hard question is how do we think about the size of the field it creates? How many trades does it bridge, how far does mastery travel across those bridges, how large does a unified ranking system become once formerly siloed professions can compare specializations. We might call this field, the AI-space.

A generation ago, a different tool opened a smaller version of the same problem. I found reviewing the impact of that tool on the industries it touched instructive, and I hope you will as well.

I. The Puppet-Maker’s Hand

Our story begins in 2011, when Ivan Owen, a steampunk prop-maker in Bellingham, Washington, built a giant articulated metal hand for a costume, worked by cables, and posted a video of it flexing. The video went viral, and it caught the attention of a carpenter in Johannesburg named Richard Van As, who saw its potential to solve a different problem. He had just lost four fingers of his right hand to a table saw, and the prosthetics on offer cost more than he could pay. Inspired by the potential of the new technology, he began writing to the puppeteer.

For months the two men passed designs across nine time zones, first as sketches and photographs, then as printable files. Partway through the work, the mother of a five-year-old South African boy named Liam, born without fingers on his right hand, found their work and reached out to them. They built Liam a working mechanical hand on a desktop 3D printer, for roughly the cost of its plastic.

Owen released the designs for free instead of patenting them. Building on the virality of the earlier videos, the files spread, and the network that grew from that decision, e-NABLE now counts roughly forty thousand volunteers in over a hundred countries and has delivered prosthetic hands to more than ten thousand children.

A puppet-maker and a carpenter, neither with a day of medical training, did the work of a medical-device company and then out-distributed it. A generation earlier this story would have been impossible. The barriers to entry around prosthetics, like the barriers around every licensed trade, were enormous: the training, the equipment, the credentialing, the supply chains, were effectively insurmountable to non-credentialed makers without a massive research institute behind them. The new CAD toolkit leveled those barriers without even trying.

All Owen and Van As, and other players like them, needed was a level playing field to interact with, and they could compete with the largest names in the world.

A level playing field makes skill legible. Legible skills develop into ranks. As more players join these ranks, hierarchies naturally form. For Owen and Van As, the tool that leveled this field was CAD, and as we will see, natural justified hierarchies, hierarchies of competence, form when that happens.

II. The Rehearsal

The tool was Computer-Aided Design, riding on the desktop 3D printer and the cheap 3D scanner, and for about a decade it had a clubhouse. Dale Dougherty launched Make magazine in January 2005 and held the first Maker Faire in San Francisco in 2006. TechShop, the first major commercial American makerspace, opened in Menlo Park that October. MIT’s FabLab specification grew from forty-five sites in 2010 to roughly three thousand across some hundred and sixty-five countries, and by 2015 the faires had drawn over a million attendees. For a membership fee, anyone could walk into a shared building, use machines no individual could afford, and learn a language that allows machines to model physical shapes.

As I argued in my Domain Mastery essay, domain mastery is transferable between “near” domains, which run on the same or similar operative principles and can be accessed by similar mental frameworks or metaphors. But when two domains run on different operating principles, and the mental frameworks, the metaphors that a person needs to use to be successful are foreign and alien to each other, we call those domains “distant. It is these distant domains that create the Tower of Babel problem from the previous essay in this series: men sealed inside siloed hierarchies, who cannot compare and compete with each other in virtuous, non-lethal ways. Without a shared field, honest ranking fails. So domains are distant because they lack a shared set of abstractions. But what is a piece of software, what is a user interface, if not a mental framework that allows you to influence or affect the underlying domain using a set of agreed upon abstractions.

We might call this a bridge tool, a tool that does comparable work across separate professional domains through a shared interface, a shared output format, and a shared body of practice. The interface is itself a mental framework: an abstraction, a metaphor, that lets the user manipulate every domain the tool touches under one set of controls. Most pieces of software respected the way that humans already divided up the world. CAD did not. Through the software family that we are referring to as CAD, users can interact with family jewelry design, dental aligners, aerospace components, and architectural models. The interface is shared, the output is a common file format, and the practice travels with the user. A surveyor with ten years of CAD mastery can move into manufacturing work in weeks or months rather than years, because the primary skillset of both jobs is making CAD files on a computer and the surveyor is already REALLY good at that.

When you look at the maker-movement part of what made it so exciting was that people transferred, in numbers and in style. Jim McKelvey owned a glassblowing studio in St. Louis and lost the sale of a glass sculpture because he could not accept the buyer’s credit card. He walked into TechShop, prototyped a little white card reader, and co-founded Square; the Museum of Modern Art acquired the reader in 2011. Bre Pettis was teaching art in Seattle public schools before he co-founded MakerBot; he sold it four years later for $403 million. Edgar Sarmiento, a Colombian-born design student, won a crowdsourced competition and became the lead designer of a production autonomous shuttle without ever working for an automaker. A glassblower in payments, an art teacher in manufacturing, a design student in automotive, a puppeteer in medical devices. CAD Mastery turned out to be the only credential, the new industries needed.

The barriers to entry fell even between industries are still quite distinct. Nearly every custom hearing aid made on earth is now 3D printed: scan the ear, shape the scan in CAD, print the shell, with over ten million units in field use. Dentistry runs the identical pipeline on teeth. The two trades have adopted mechanically identical workflows, because the shared tool dictated the optimal workflow’s shape. In a modern lab, one Formlabs resin printer can run jewelry casting resin on Monday, dental surgical-guide resin on Tuesday, and engineering prototype resin on Wednesday. Only the cartridge changes.

Again what allowed the movement in these stories was mastery of the shared Bridge Tool, the interface named above. I describe the effect as similar to how a gaming controller (xbox or playstation as you prefer) can allow a skilled player to quickly achieve success in shooting games, fighting games, driving games, and flying games within hours, though the genres share almost nothing cognitively. A player’s mastery of the singular interface of the game controller, means that his skills transfer to other domains with incredible speed, far faster than if he had to master custom tools for each process no matter how much better the theoretical control that customized tool SHOULD be.

III. Temporary Egalitarianism, Durable Hierarchy

By most contemporary accounts, the American makerspace movement peaked around 2014. TechShop filed Chapter 7 in 2017. Maker Media went insolvent in 2019 after Autodesk, Intel, and Microsoft withdrew their sponsorships. The natural reading is that the CAD movement failed: the clubhouses closed, the magazines died, and the bridge tool must have been a fad.

There is a joke, or at least a story, that people tell in many emerging industries about the gold rush: the miners go broke, and the men selling picks and shovels get rich. The moral of the story is, don’t be the miner, be the pick and shovel salesman. There is a time and place in which this is true, namely in the height of a gold rush, when a bunch of otherwise unprepared people come and using money that they earned doing SOMETHING OTHER THAN GOLD MINING, buy a pick and shovel and decide to try their fortune. But by its very nature the fate of the unprepared masses is that 90%+ have no skills, are unable to capitalize on whatever gains they made, and lose their shirts in short order. When enough miners quit, the pickaxe sellers have nothing left, and have only been a parasitic free-rider on a short-term fad.

By contrast the stable model is organized mining: a hierarchy of labor, leadership, and deployed capital that can predictably extract gold over a longer period of time. Working with and supplying those meticulously organized companies is less exciting and creates less profit per transaction. In the pick and shovel context this is literally true, the mining company is going to send an experienced negotiator to buy their shovels and pickaxes in bulk, or set up a manufacturing center to build them at cost. But over the long-haul, it is relationships with these efficient high-quality producers (who are always intensely focused on identifying and respecting competence hierarchies) that produce real wealth.

One of the features of the short-term fad is a massive amount of egalitarian feeling. This is because the hierarchies are not known. Egalitarianism during the initial rush is solution to an information disparity, not a claim that all of the people you are treating the same will actually be wealth-creators on a longer time-scale. Any situation where the hierarchies are not known creates an information gap: nobody yet knows which walk-in will matter, which shop will produce, which master will wind up being ranked high enough to remember old slights. While that gap lasts, the rational short-term move is to treat everybody equally, or at least to treat everybody well, because it costs very little to be polite and a great deal to write off the wrong person too early. “Do not bet against any player” is a let’s-not-offend-anybody posture. It is prudent. It is rational. It is prudent and rational BECAUSE the players are ignorant, not just of each other’s rankings but of their own.

However, once the sequence of iterative games begins and people begin to accrue wins and losses, hierarchy forms and the egalitarian bubble pops.

CAD is not an exception to this process. The bridge between domains creates a new playing field, a vast unsorted space full of massive opportunity for wealth creation. This was followed by a decade of egalitarian expectation before a durable hierarchy emerged. MakerBot sold for four hundred and three million dollars on a thesis of monetizing mass access; that thesis failed as a commercial model, and Stratasys pivoted toward industrial customers. These were the pickaxe businesses. Their thesis was access was the main bottleneck and therefore cheap access for everyone would create broadly distributed wealth. The overwhelming majority of their customers never produced anything profitable. When the thesis of abundant access was tested it failed.

People read the bankruptcies listed abovce as the death of the CAD movement. That reading confuses the failure of the egalitarian viewpoint (which is inevitable) with the death of the CAD hierarchy. They are different events. What actually happened was a CAD aristocracy emerged: ranked skill, portable credentials, and a labor market that prices mastery across industries. The result of that change was that left-leaning outlets that had cheered the open clubhouses stopped covering the story once the outcomes stopped matching their narrative. In reality the hierarchy kept compounding.

The hierarchy shows up today on resumes rather than in crowds. CAD mastery is a certified, ranked, portable credential. Autodesk runs a tiered ladder from Certified User to Certified Professional, with separate tracks for construction and for manufacturing; SolidWorks runs one from Associate through Professional to Expert, each rank earned by examination. Employers in architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, aerospace, and medical-device development read the same certificates the same way. Engineers Rule reported in 2015 that, according to those who do the hiring at Disney, a SolidWorks certification will not necessarily guarantee a job, but it will land the interview. Rank earned inside the tool’s hierarchy is honored inside every industry hierarchy the tool touches. A friend of mine took a job with a surveyor precisely for the CAD experience that came with it; once he had years on the tool and a certification, he could move anywhere he called CAD-space. A man who holds the Professional rank can move anywhere in CAD-space in both senses of the word: anywhere in the modeled geometry, and anywhere in the labor market the tool touches.

Four vendors — Autodesk, Dassault, PTC, and Siemens — hold roughly two thirds of the CAD market. These are the dukes of CAD. Their moat is less the software alone than the certification apparatus that issues patents of nobility for peak users who hold the bottleneck in their brains and fingers. In August 2024 Stratasys sued Bambu Lab over patents. In January 2025 Bambu locked its firmware against the open-source tools that had built the field. Those who bet that forever-open mass access was the permanent order lost their shirts. Those who bet on rank and on protecting hierarchies of skill did not.

So to restated this as a prediction, the pattern is as follows: A Bridge Tool creates an information gap; egalitarianism rides that gap for a season; the pickaxe sellers prosper while the field is illegible; then rank consolidates, the access businesses die, and the hierarchy remains. CAD already finished the cycle across a score or so of industries. AI is about to do the same thing at a civilizational scale.

IV. The Second Tool Is Bigger, Much Bigger

In December 2025, a Sydney data analyst named Paul Conyngham drove ten hours to inject his dog with a cancer vaccine he had designed himself. Rosie, a Staffy cross he had rescued in 2019, had mast cell cancer; surgery, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy had each slowed it and none had stopped it, and the vets had given her months. Conyngham had seventeen years in machine learning and not one day of biology. He opened a chatbot and asked how to treat the disease, and the model walked him through it: sequence the healthy and the tumor cells, find the neoantigens, design an mRNA protocol to train the immune system against them. He paid about three thousand dollars to sequence Rosie’s tissue, ran the mutations through AlphaFold to map the mutated proteins, and used three different models to design the protocol, refine it, and check it. Then he carried it to Páll Thordarson at the University of New South Wales, whose RNA institute evaluated the protocol, cleared the ethics review, and manufactured the vaccine in under two months. By late January, Rosie’s largest tumor had shrunk by roughly three quarters, and she was clearing fences after rabbits again.

Now this is not to say that “AI cures cancer.” Caveats abound: This is one dog, with no control group, under a treatment no one has replicated; partial remission is not a cure, and mast cell tumors wax and wane on their own. Nor did an AI allow a data analyst to recreate a gene-lab in his basement: a state of the art lab at the University of South Wales actually made the treatment and took responsibility for putting it into a living animal. But even despite all those caveats, its a crazy impressive story. Compare it to the CAD puppet-maker and its a similar feat... albeit on a medical problem at least one order of magnitude more complex. When asked Conyngham put it in these terms: the chatbots, he said, empowered him to act with the power of a research institute. That is the collapsing siloes effect but this time the domains are sales consulting and oncology.

CAD used a file type (or perhaps a file family) to bridge the gaps between trades that model, cut, or deposit amounts in a defined 3-D space. The new tool’s medium is language and code, and language and code are what every serious profession already runs on. The lawyer’s brief, the physician’s chart, the farmer’s spray log, the engineer’s test suite: all of it is language and code. And the same workflow disciplines are being implemented by everyone who is trying to access the massive wealth the efficiencies of AI seem to create.

We are all listening to Andrej Karpathy. Orchestrate the model. Verify its output. Keep auditable state. Constrain it with tests. Open the trade press of any field this year and you find the same article wearing different nouns: the bar journal teaching lawyers to verify model output against the record, the medical informatics journal teaching clinicians to verify it against the chart, the agronomy newsletter teaching growers to verify it against automated sensors and farming machines. The shared tool, the shared interface, the common metaphor and domain masteries built or adapted to that mental model is dictating the workflows of every industry.

So ask the CAD question at the new scale. The certified drafter can move anywhere in CAD-space. What is the AI-space? Try to name an industry that is not being impacted, segmented, and reconnected by a tool that translates natural language into code-precise implementation. The humble terminal is the best proof. For fifty years the command line was the most powerful and least usable interface in computing, a priesthood’s instrument, accessible only to the most precise, most autistic members of our body politic. Now, with AI wrapper interpreting the natural language, it now takes instructions in plain English and outputs working commands with the machine grade precision the terminal requires.

The way that the release of ChatGPT affected Super Mario developers is instructive. All the way up to GPT-2, Researchers who wanted Super Mario levels out of the pre-wrapper generation of models (MarioGPT) had to be hyper precise in their prompting, grafting on new attention weights and fine-tuning through fifty thousand training steps, in order to have a chance of getting playable output. After the GPT-3, that same request is a sentence. Natural language in, code-precise implementation out, in any domain that can describe its own work: that is the AI-space, and we are all struggling to name an industry out side of this.

V. What will AI hierarchy look like?

So the process of a hierarchy emerging in this new massive playing field, as the disparate silos are deconstructed comes in three phases. First, the floor will drop: a newcomer in any bridged domain can collaborate with practitioners of any other through the shared interface. Second, the ceiling rises: masters become comparable across domains, because the shared field makes shared ranking possible. Third, a hierarchy emerges: where comparison is possible, ranking follows, and the ranked masters consolidate above the local hierarchies.

The floor has already dropped; that is essentially what vibe-coding is. The ceiling is rising now. Marc Andreessen has been watching early leading-edge companies in the Valley circle a job title loosely called “builder.” Programmer, product manager, and designer used to be three separate jobs. Each specialty now expects AI to cover the other two: a “Mexican standoff” in which Andreessen predicts all three sides are correct. Each can generate the work of all three, so the job becomes builder. One person becomes responsible for shipping complete products, with AI filling the gaps outside his original training. Masters in that shared field are becoming comparable across the old specialty walls.

A similar thing is happening in law, tax, and accounting, where a practitioner more familiar with the new tools and the underlying principles can achieve parallel performance, or even outperform a seasoned professional in their own specialty.

My prediction is that soon the best harness-builder in a law firm and the best harness-builder on a farm will be legible to each other, because both are visibly operating the same instrument with different cartridges loaded. You can watch the local version in any serious business environment this year. Some person has quietly become the one others bring their stuck problems to, the one whose harness everyone else’s work flows through, and that person’s is performing a disproportionate amount of work regardless of their formal domain expertise. Multiply that room by every trade that runs on language, and you have the early rungs assembling.

Once these types of domain cross-overs start happening it is only a matter of time until a hierarchy emerges. That stable hierarchy of tool-masters will consolidate across every bridged profession the way it consolidated over the design trades, because the same mechanism is running here with more force and more reach. As with everything involving AI it appears we are speed-running this process. The frontier models are already, barely 3 years in, straining under the pressures the makerspace businesses only faced after a decade.

The pickaxe sellers are already feeling it. In the spring of 2026 Microsoft cancelled most of its Claude Code licenses inside the Experiences and Devices division, the group that builds Windows, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, and Surface, and told engineers to migrate to GitHub Copilot CLI by the end of June after the token bill ate the annual AI budget. Uber’s CTO told The Information the company had burned its entire planned 2026 AI-tools budget in four months on Claude Code and Cursor, with heavy users spending hundreds to thousands of dollars a month in tokens; the COO publicly admitted the firm still could not draw a clean line from that spend to shipped consumer features. They were not outliers. Bain’s 2026 survey of nearly a thousand large companies found that AI cost savings routinely landed below the bands executives had budgeted for, and Gartner placed generative AI in the trough of disillusionment, forecasting that a quarter of planned 2026 AI budgets would slip into 2027 as proofs of concept died in procurement. The tools worked well enough that engineers used them constantly. What failed to materialize was the durable work product the budgets had been sold on. The pickaxe sellers appear to have neglected to notice that you have to be digging where the gold ACTUALLY IS in order for your tool to be useful.

And yet there are what are being called 10x tokens. Meta’s CTO told a room that his best engineer was spending a salary’s worth of tokens and running five to ten times more productive for it: easy money, no limit. Jensen Huang said he would be alarmed if a half-million-dollar engineer burned only a few thousand dollars in tokens in a year. The industry has begun to treat heavy token spend as the mark of the new peak performer.

That framing is convenient, because it lets people talk about tokens and budgets while ignoring the politically incorrect conclusions underneath. Most major corporate org charts are the product of deceptive and non-meritorious sorting processes. The most immediately available piece of evidence for is that Elon was able to cut 80% of the bloat at Twitter and performance improved. The hierarchy of credentials that staffed the last forty years of the profession is deeply corrupt. A tiny fraction of engineers whom the powers that be have been suppressing for those decades are about to gain actual political power and relevance, because a bridge tool makes their competence visible in a way the credential ladder never would.

Many people are framing this as a “10x” tokens question. That framing strikes me as hilariously wrong. Behind the “10x tokens” as far as I can tell ,are just the peak engineers. The same tool that burned Uber’s budget without a clear line to shipped features returns an order of magnitude for the operator who already knows what he wants the work to become. Eric Raymond, responding to the public complaints that language models spit out worthless code, asked whether the naysayers were on weak models or had some kind of skill issue he cannot see because for him, his mental habits and communication skills naturally allow him to direct AI to massive effect. He describes getting 40 years of work, a lifetime of output, done in mere months. What he is pointing at is the scarce capacity he elsewhere assigns to the human side of the loop: architectural thinking, the higher-level pattern judgment the model is blind to when it generates to specification. Billions are being wasted on misdirected token spend, he noted. Be clear in your thinking, tell the model what you want with precision, and good things happen.

This also explains Jensen Huang’s situation at Nvidia. He has hired for the best and has not allowed partisan and ethnic bias to corrupt the sorting process, so AI supercharges an organization that was already sorted for competence. Nvidia is also incredibly small by comparison with the corporate giants that spent the same decades building the corrupt credential hierarchy into their hiring. Those giants are, in all probability, unable to change, and they will die.

In that sense AI is an alkahest. In Renaissance alchemy the alkahest was the theorized universal solvent: the liquid that could dissolve any composite substance down to its primary components without destroying what was essential in them. It was believed that upon dissolving all that could be dissolved that what would be left would be the philosopher’s stone, the key to changing lead into gold and creating elixirs of immortality. AI is an alkahest of our corporate credentialing system. It sifts out the philosophers stone from base elements. It dissolves the sealed silos and the credential smoke-screens that hid people from one another, and in dissolving them it searches out the top-level thinkers who can do the architectural thinking Raymond describes. Perhaps we might say instead of finding the philosopher’s stone it finds the philosophers.

But this is just the same kind of uneven distribution that we have seen before, and that if you will permit me that we ALWAYS see, in analogous situations. The promises of egalitarianism always prove false, and there was always a tiny minority that capture the vast majority of the wealth BECAUSE THEY WERE THE PRODUCTIVE AND TALENTED ONES FROM THE BEGINNING.

VI. Genuine Equality of Opportunity Always Creates a Hierarchy of Competence

Remember that the assumption that genuine opportunity creates equality of outcomes is a fundamentally left-wing premise and is not supported by any evidence whatsoever. A shared interface opens the field to anyone who walks in. Once the field is open, skill becomes visible across domains that used to hide inside credentialed siloes. When skill is Legible it can be compared. When skill is compared humans recognize ranks. Recognized Ranks consolidate the field into a hierarchy of competence. The less that the opportunity is gamed by leftist assumptions about equality of outcome, the cleaner the ranking, because nobody can hide behind crutches and handicaps meant to ensure that no one loses too badly.

Again the thing I want to emphasize is that CAD ran the pattern on a limited set of industries. Anyone with a membership could use the laser cutter; the winners of the CAD race are intimately tied to a certification system that is brutal in its ranking. AI is running the same pattern at civilizational scale. Vibe-coding drops the floor. The builder title raises the ceiling. The 10x-token debate is not a story about magic tokens. It is a story that keeps trying not to notice the competence hierarchy the tool is already making legible.

The equality of opportunity that AI is giving us is going to produce what genuine opportunity always produces... which is to say hierarchy, deep, inescapable, politically incorrect hierarchy. Without a shared field there is no honest ranking, only sealed silos and ultimately a tower of Babel story. But with the alkahest of AI, the siloes are dissolving, the players meet, and competence sorts itself the way it always does once the games start to iterate.

One final point. When there is a hierarchy, there will be an apex. Every ladder has a top rung. The man who sits there is the one who masters the master tool entirely: who can make it write, make it speak, and make it move things in the world. Armies and hospitals alike will bid for him, and no team of ordinary size will stand against him. The next essay is about that man, and about what sits at the top of the AI hierarchy. I call him the AI Paladin.

We started this substack with an image of a city on pillars. That is the vision of the idealized Western polis, with multiple economic pillars, supporting a broad level playing field, the marketplaces for deals and ideals, and a thin transparent dome of the state sheltering us from the elements. So that is the image that we want to get to, the cosmology of our ideal world.

But where do we actually live? What metaphor actually describes the place we find ourselves in?

[Cue Twilight Zone theme. Black-and-white. Rod Serling, cigarette in hand, addresses the camera:]

“For your whole life you have lived in the Tower. The Tower is all around you, and your culture has been building it for all of your life. You, bright intrepid explorer that you are, have probably found the cracks or windows in the Tower, but many of your countrymen have never seen the sky. Living in the Tower is an exercise in dealing with the immovable choices of those who came before you. Individuals and families cannot build their own houses, or dwelling units; they have to live within the templates set by the Tower, limits that govern how many friends you can have, and even how many CHILDREN you can have. And recently the Tower has been getting worse and worse: the water does not work, the air is frequently bad, and the lights are starting to go off more and more, and for longer and longer, and you worry that someday they will never come back on. But most people do not worry about that, because the main question that occupies the minds of your people is… who will be at the top of the Tower.”

“Now our Tower has heroes — a brilliant software engineer and manager, a manufacturing magnate, and a real estate investor with a second career as a reality TV star. They work really hard, and they climb really high, and they climb so high that they actually get to the top of the Tower, which has a table (there is always a table). [Insert ominous music to raise suspense]

But when the table they sit down at the table to discuss what they shall do, and they open their mouths to try and fix the Tower, and nothing but gibberish comes out of their mouths.”

“When this is your problem where are you? The Tower of Babel” [Insert jangling chimes to accompany announcement of the terrible truth]

II. We have reached Peak Centralization… and We can No Longer Speak each other’s language.

I actually do not think this is as much of a metaphor as we would prefer. In case you did not notice the three men I mentioned are Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump, each of whom has climbed to the top in different ways and each of whom have been incredibly ineffective at building coalitions with their alleged peers.

Trump and Elon

As you may recall, DOGE was originally conceived of as a kind of public-private partnership between the Trump Administration and the various pools of talent that Elon had access to, which aimed to accomplish the same kind of top-down driven efficiency improvements that Elon had accomplished at Twitter and in his other companies. Given this mission it made sense for Elon himself (as arguably the most skilled fat trimmer in history) to lead the effort. The partnership was rocky from the beginning, I recall the black eye that Elon sported after meetings with senior members of the Trump staff, the constant news media and lawfare on even the most basic cuts that Elon proposed. The Trump Administration eventually bowed to the pressure to restrict DOGE’s mission and Elon’s role in particular until he resigned. Shortly after resigning the Trump administration proposed and rammed through the Big Beautiful Bill and there was a vicious back and forth online with Elon insinuating that Trump was in the Epstein files and Trump threatening to revoke the government contracts held by various Elon companies.

The point that I want to make here is that by the accounts of experts in the (ever more) disparate domains of corporate efficiency and public relations both men were performing at peak levels. Elon’s accomplishments with Doge, both personally and in terms of the team that he recruited and ran, were literally awe inspiring. In slightly over 4 months he uncovered so much fraud that the claim that our entire national debt is simply the result of private inurement by our managerial class is no longer a fringe conspiracy claim.

Likewise, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a massive legislative accomplishment, certainly the most important piece of legislation in both of Trump’s terms, and arguably akin to Obamacare in terms of how much it will shift the landscape (assuming that its provisions are not stripped out by judicial fiat).

What I want to point out is that neither man has any kind of expertise in the other’s domain, and so they have no way to evaluate the difficulty of the feat performed, nor were they positioned to benefit from the accomplishment of the other person. Trump has very little concept of manufacturing efficiency (real estate of the kind he practices tends to reward “spend big, charge more” models). Meanwhile, Musk still has a very naive version of politics and constantly expresses feelings of betrayal by people who were openly signalling (for anyone familiar with political language) what they were about to do. This is despite an AMAZING amount of baseline political alignment in donors, investors, and allies. Trump and Musk’s political futures are so interlinked as to bring to mind Benjamin Franklin’s quip “We must all hang together, or we will assuredly hang separately.” Yet despite every incentive to align their lack of overlap in their domains of expertise means that they must deal through trusted intermediaries neither of whom can fully translate the concepts and intentions of one potentate into the language of the other.

As a friend of mine said in one of the conversations that birthed this article. “Musk and Trump are like two emperors of separate lands, separate languages, separate courts, separate power structures, separate moral hierarchies. The problem is that they are NOT separate at all. They are interdependent and intertwined on every level that it is possible to be EXCEPT that of communication.”

This nigh-inescapable interdependence of risk, despite deep incompatibility of communication style is what I mean when I say we are in the Tower of Babel.

Elon and Gates

A more obvious example is the way that both men interact with Bill Gates, who does NOT share their deep political alignment. Musk himself famously attempted to explain the math of his electric semi-trucks to Gates in person, and at the end of the conversation Musk concluded that “He [Gates] is not strong in the sciences.” I think that most people tend to read that as Gates being an intractable politicized bigot, deliberately refusing to understand something “because his salary depends upon him NOT understanding it” as the old saying goes.

But what if it is not that? What if it is literally true that Gates lacks the domain expertise to evaluate Musk’s claims and was dependent upon (presumably politicized) analysts and intermediaries to do the math for him. Do recall that Gates ultimately lost money (somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5B as I recall) on the shorts of Tesla and other Musk related enterprises. Two of the most successful men alive cannot evaluate each other on core factual claims. Each has the other’s domain mostly wrong.

Trump and Gates

In October 2025, Gates published a long climate memo arguing the world should refocus from emission-curbing toward preventing human suffering. Trump immediately began opining on Truth Social that: “We just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG.” Gates responded with: “a gigantic misreading of the memo.” Again these two elites cannot agree on what a memo says, let alone on the problem underneath it.

The point that I want to make here is that these men have no common language. No shared field of expertise. No language any of the three can use to honestly assess either of the others on the others’ own terms. They speak past each other because they have nothing in common other than money and a history of success in apparently incompatible domains.

Begging the Question

So our elites appear literally incapable of collaboration and genuine coordination, which would require a common understanding of aims, goals, methods, and a whole host of background knowledge on the costs and implications of the methods they are genuine experts in. Why is this?

The first answer that occurs to people tends to be egotism: three enormous egos colliding, as egos do. But the record shows each man behaving rationally and performing near his peak inside his own domain. Egotism explains the heat of the feuds but does nothing to explain the specific failure on display, which is the inability of each man to measure what the others had done.

A more complete answer lies, I believe, in the way that our culture has shifted the definition of “Economy” over the past 4 centuries, and the impact on the dominance games we no longer play.

III. Economies of Scale and Dominance Games.

Economy is derived liguistically from the Greek oikonomia: household organization, the law of the house. I once heard a lawyer maintain that the best modern analogue to the ancient concept is the company agreement of an LLC: a list of ways to determine what the organization will do in a given set of circumstances, with a fair amount of industry-specific business-model instruction thrown in for good measure. The ancient economy was many such households, each running its own agreement, each with its own storehouse, social hierarchy, and frequently tokens of rank and credit (issuing its own currency in effect). The city on pillars is exactly that image: many smaller hierarchies, many independent gatekeepers, many apex positions a man can spend himself achieving and occupying, with honor paid especially within families. That last part matters for fertility, among other necessary pillars of existence.

Industrial economics dismantled this traditional stasis. Limited liability, demanded by the managerial class, arrived with its evil twin, regulation, and together they turned every market into a monopolistic competition whose iterated endgame is one provider serving a global market of consumers. The specialized monopolies that result are efficient, frequently addictively so. Every corporate giant is autistically good at satisfying one tiny piece of the human soul: Apple at taste, Walmart at procurement, Amazon at delivery, Goldman at capital, Pfizer at compliance. None of them can manage a whole human, let alone a whole household. None of them can offer an employment arc longer than five or ten years, let alone a pension. (Though the Japanese seem to still manage it; more on that in a future post.)

The problem with this is that this leaves us with no way to play dominance games. Now why is that bad you ask? Much of modern culture is about AVOIDING dominance games (at least masculine ones) at all costs.

Dominance games are essential ritualized structures that transform potentially lethal competition into a manageable contest of status, allowing real competition to occur without robbing the tribe of the loser’s contributions. A famous example is the way that mountain sheep use head-bashing to establish hierarchy among themselves—a ritualized display that preserves the life of the combatants—while not hesitating to using their quite dangerous horns to gore all other species. They are perfectly capable of using their horns on their own... but they don’t as that would weaken the herd. Wolf packs only have the alpha, beta, etc ranks inside of zoos and prison environments, in the wild they actually have numerous and sophisticated ways of playing complex games of submission that allow authority to be shared and traded back and forth so that the pack is not fatally weakened.

Historically, humans utilized games around the dominant technology to determine relative rank without resorting to mutual destruction, which weakens the tribe (our version of the herd/pack if you like). In a healthy culture, these games create a shared, structured field of competition. The medieval tournament took the deadliest men in Europe, mounted, armored, and trained from boyhood for exactly one kind of killing, and ran them at each other with blunted lances under the arms of courtesy. A knight could be unhorsed in the lists before every peer he had, stand up, and ride home alive with his life intact. By the end of the tourney the heralds had called the standings, and everyone from the king to the grooms, including most importantly the MEN IN THE ARENA THEMSELVES knew who stood where. The loser knew that the winner had more skill, more strength, and was more capable of defending their shared interests than he was. The tournament made rank legible among lethal men while preserving the losers for the next war that the larger tribe would engage in. That competition allows elites to measure their standing and resolve conflict without threatening the survival of the tribe

Patrick Bet David famously discussed how billionaires tend to be people that are hyper-dominant in one field.

The basic problem with our current batch of elites, as I see it, is that they have convinced themselves that their game was “real” or “fundamental” or “justified” in a way that the games played by other similar men were not. Rather than making ALL elites play the same game, we have raised up men whose qualifications to play the great games of finance and politics is that they have no peers in one discrete game or another. They have learned from experience that the ONLY values that matter are the ones that they themselves embody the best. We have created artificial silos measuring only one tiny slice of the human soul, and the result of that hyper-specialized contest has been the production not of gods but of Titans. They are Titans embodying a narrow, inhuman concept with ruthless perfection, but their ruthless perfection leaves them deeply alienated. They are peerless, which is fine until you remember that one way to summarize essentially all of human culture as the quest to find and win the acclaim of one’s peers.

Underneath the Titans, the men who are themselves load-bearing pillars of our economy, the country has no resilient distributed network of Oiko-Nomias, with each households relatively independent, especially in matters of core survival of their neighbors. Rather our Tower of Babel resembles more and more a stack of cards, or that weird corporate icebreaker game where everyone sits on each other’s knees. We do NOT have multiple pillars that can endure the loss of some percentage of their fellow market-makers. We have dismantled those things leaving only a single fragile global stack.

The point that I want to make is that Trump/Musk/Gates communication breakdown is the INEVITABLE OUTCOME of our policy choices. We have specialized and centralized and specialized and centralized, again “added house to house, and field to field, until there is no more room” and we thoroughly deserve the woes that the prophet Isaiah pronounced upon us. Because our elites have no overlapping skill sets or domain mastery they cannot play honest dominance games. Each man feels himself to be performing well, and the objections brought by the counter-party are “cheating.”

What we are missing is one unifying game we can play against each other and understand our relative ranks. We technically share a major worldwide language, but English’s dialects and subdialects have diverged so far, especially along political and technical lines, that we are “one people divided by a common language,” as the Americans and the English used to be said to be.

What we have instead is something closer to mutual assured destruction. The separate games do not rank the players against one another. Each game is a binary veto on the system itself. A manufacturing magnate can only win by turning off production. A financier can only threaten by turning off liquidity that pays his salary. A platform owner can turn off the pipes, destroying his core IP. A regulator can strangle a sector leaving his specialty worthless. None of these moves settle any kind of ranking contest They only work if the loser is willing to burn the world to the ground starting with his house. You see this in the interaction between the SEC and Elon in the fines that were levied right at the end of the Biden administration. Elon wound up paying the fines because the alternative was for his line of credit to be cut off, destroying his company. Every successful venture requires the overlap of multiple actor who have no ground of moral similarity.

As I have often observed in discussing these matters, Roman Helmet Guy had the right diagnosis: these are artificial spreadsheet meritocracies. The standings are legible only inside each silo. They have little or no bearing on the actual meritocracy of violence, or on any shared field where lethal men could test each other and live. A man can top every leaderboard in his domain and still have no way to prove, to his peers or to himself, that he would prevail if the contest turned serious. So the separate games do not produce honor. They produce veto power.

What our current elites do is not fencing with the possibility of parrying. It is not even a duel with pistols at twenty paces, where it is plausible for both men to survive. It is more like two men with shotguns at twenty feet, each convinced the other cheated at a game neither of them fully understands. Worse, the stack keeps increasing the destructiveness of the arms of the competitors. Every hyper-specialized Titan holds up a load-bearing piece of the Tower. Any one of a thousand (or more) billionaires who feels his interests threatened could potentially crash the system, because his narrow excellence has been woven into something the rest of us cannot live without. The cold war between them stays cold only while everyone tolerates losing. The escalation does not stop at shotguns. It ends with each competitor armed with a nuclear suicide vest and a dead man’s switch, promising that if he cannot enjoy being king, no one gets to live in the Tower.

So what does this produce? In any situation where humans can leave, it produces a literal departure from the collapsing tower. This can look like people groups leaving Ancient Sumeria, or the American founders fleeing the constraints on thought and innovation that were centralizing the European nations into vast inflexible empires. People who do not understand the motivations, necessity, or benefits of divergent skillsets form a tribal hierarchy around what they DO value and leave. Defection incentives mean that as soon as the first group goes the others face ever increasing pressure to follow. You can still see this in the way that California’s attempts to raise revenue by taxing the heads of their productive tribes (tech startups) simply result in those value-creation engines departing the state.

Remember this was Elon’s original goal, to build an ark, take his tribe to Mars and essentially never return. But somewhere along the line he came to the conclusion that even his genius could not escape from the industrial Tower of Babel that we are all trapped in.

IV. The Tower is Falling, Whether We Like It or Not

So you have been in a Tower reaching toward the heavens all your life. And it is worth acknowledging that despite all its flaws and failures, despite its growing dysfunction, and despite the way that our Elites have become less and less able to talk to each other, the Tower has uplifted millions of people out of poverty, it has solved pricing dilemmas and allowed us to build supply chains of complexity undreamed of by the ancient world. We are, to put it mildly, not confident in our ability to provide an alternative structure that guarantees the survival of substantial populations both in our own countries and around the world, if we start turning things off so that we can update or refurbish them.

Almost any arguments for reforming or replacing it founder on the moral risk associated with disturbing this structure, and all the vulnerable people that are hyper-dependent on it. Whether you frame this as “the Tower is a net good” or “the Tower is a necessary evil holding back a greater horror” is more about personality than it is about a different analysis. This is why we do not know how to move forward, why we are all paralyzed by a lack of “permission structures”. The current system materially provides better than all past systems at least one order of magnitude and maybe more.

We can lament the social and political effects of our silos, we have lots of fear and disgust for the titans that those silos breed… but not enough to want to break them.

The truth is that these things carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. The current system has no way of offering our emerging elites a dominance game short of a cold economic and propaganda war, which remains cold… only so long as the losing side tolerates losing. At some point one of those titans will decide that if he cannot enjoy being the dominant political actor “then no man shall.” Another way (arguably the most healthy and pro-social way) of articulating this insight is Joe Lonsdale’s recent comments about being “willing to pay a 90% tax rate” if that allowed him and his to live in a “functioning society.” 90% of Joe Lonsdale’s fortune (properly applied) could have an INCREDIBLE impact on the democratic systems of even the First World, and could plausibly fund the outright conquest of several second tier nations, and essentially anywhere in the developing world. Lonsdale’s conservative temperament means that he, and other Right-Wing Billionaires are unlikely to actually DO any of these things (as Curtis Yarvin consistently bemoans on X). But presumably there are significant number of less virtuous, less restrained figures with vast sums. At some point one of them is going to make a move.

Even finance, which has long been the only remaining thread binding our fair republic (and the global system which it subsidized) together, is failing. To be clear, that is what all of these massive debt loads mean. They mean that the financiers are not able to efficiently calculate what comes next, what moves are necessary to keep the promises of growth going.

The problem is that the economic incentives of growth for our system as a whole are no different from Enron. One of my professors in law school had actually read the emails and transcripts of Enron’s corporate communications. He told me that before they decided to break the rules, they had very intensive conversation looking for another way to exceed their growth. They were trying to “win the game” as they understood it. Rather than accepting the ugly limitation of real growth in the real world, with real humans, and actual atoms, the board of Enron decided to introduce another layer of abstraction into the mix and financialize the difference, which I want to emphasize was the financially winning strategy. While the specific techniques that Enron used were illegal at the time, essentially the entire Private Equity industry, and more and more the emerging hyper-scaler industry (which is less and less related to AI as a technology) are following the same logic. As are our global central banks. The rumors around a new reserve currency or CBDCs are like the debt, just warning signs, evidences that the system as it exists lacks the moral and technical capacity to perpetuate itself.

What happens to a system that cannot perpetuate itself? Well the final scarce resource, high-quality, high-IQ, high-trust people drops more and more, until it cannot sustain the population. This leads to expulsions of certain groups, denial of benefits, and overall a contraction of the population, especially the high-IQ population, and the thing happens over and over again, until all confidence drops out of the bottom of the system. This is why you have so many people talking about the collapse of the Roman empire.

V. Conclusion

It is in the light of this that AI is spoken of by the Tech Right in terms analogous to an act of divine intervention (mediated of course by the Cult of Effective Altruism). This is what Elon means when he says “The government is basically unfixable….If AI and robots don’t solve our national debt. We’re toast.” (He says the same thing about our birthrate crisis by the way).

Interestingly, AI is incredibly good at bridging the literal communication gaps upon which the Babel story is built. On 25 March 2026, the Japanese artist @FUTOCHIMPO posted art depicting U.S. Navy sailors from Sasebo cooking bacon at a yakiniku restaurant. The post drew 24.2 million views and 79,000 likes inside a week, the great majority from Americans. Americans did not become fluent in Japanese in those seven days. Since mid-March, Grok had been quietly translating and recommending foreign-language posts into the For You feed; Musk announced the feature four days after the bacon post, and X’s head of product called the worldwide rollout the largest cultural exchange in history. What followed was a sustained convergence between Japanese and American X that had been latent for years and is now visible week to week, from Sanseito’s outreach to its American counterparts to the way Trump’s endorsement of Sanae Takaichi matured into her February supermajority.

One X user, in a moment of insight I would likely never have found without my own AI assistants, called the moment a reversal of the Tower of Babel. The curse of Babel was confusion: tongues sealed against each other, the building halted, the people scattered. What happened in March was the opposite event. A machine translated between sealed tongues, and two peoples who had no common language discovered they had a common culture. That is the curse lifting, by a crack.

And maybe that is all AI will be, is a way of perpetuating our current large-scale structure. And to be clear, I think that some people, maybe even most will use it in that way. Maybe Elon will build a version of Grok that he can trust to evaluate and predict the behavior of men like Gates and Trump, and give him the tools that he apparently lacks to persuade them toward useful collaboration. Maybe, though I find this possibility significantly less likely, Trump and Gates, and others like them will ALSO have AI assistants that they trust to bet their lives and political futures on. If so maybe we can shackle the Titans we have raised in the bowels of our Tower and limp along for another 100 years, declining slowly the way Rome did. Our elites are certainly incentivized to try.

But if AI follows the trend of other universalizing tools, maybe it will recreate the conditions for a new type of non-lethal dominance game, one that can be played by many many people. Maybe instead of revitalizing our leaning Tower we can build a new city, whose pillars and foundations are those who have mastered the new set of skills that AI will make hyperdominant in essentially all domains. Fortunately, this is not the first time that a new piece of technology has bridged multiple, apparently disparate economic and technical domains. And we will get into that…in the next post!

I am the father of several small children, and one of their favorite movies is The Secret of Kells. Its hero is a boy named Brendan, a young novice at the Abbey of Kells, orphaned as an infant in a Viking raid that killed his parents. He is raised by his uncle, the Abbot Cellach, who spends his days furiously building a wall around everything that he has left.

The inciting incident is the arrival of Brother Aidan, a refugee from Iona, carrying an unfinished illuminated manuscript that will one day be called the Book of Kells. Brendan is set to work on the manuscript and falls in love with its beauty. Aidan, in classic center-left fashion, teaches the boy that the book is the thing that can finally defeat the evils the Abbot is walling out. So Brendan is pulled between the two men raising him, the uncle who builds the wall and the old monk who illuminates the book. The film, again in classic center-left fashion, closes with a miracle that vindicates Aidan and indicts Cellach.

Being a student of history, I tell my children about the rough men who eventually secured the British Isles against the Vikings, and I make sure they know the walls were necessary. I also make sure they know the Abbot was wrong. The imbalance the film portrays so well is the one I watch play out over and over in online right-wing purity spirals. Walls are necessary and Cellach was right to build his. His failure was forgetting what the wall was for.

II. “Trust but Verify” is a Left-Wing Frame

This essay continues a conversation Max Meursault began in “The Game Theory of Social Trust,” and The Creative Kingmaker carried forward in “How to Become Trustworthy.” My contribution begins with an observation: the decision to extend (or not to extend) trust is based on two judgments about the world that a man makes often long before the specific decision is in view.

The first is his estimate of human nature at its floor: what share of people, given the opportunity and some reasonable expectation of getting away with it, will lie, cheat, or prey on whoever trusts them. The second is his read of the particular people in front of him, and how far they have already been sorted and curated above that floor.

The left and many libertarians set that floor fairly high. People are basically good, they assume, so any betrayal must be the fault of the one with resources, which the left blithely calls power. If a man proves untrustworthy, something terrible must have been done to him; someone with power must have ruined him, or some deep wound must explain him. You can watch the assumption operate in the left-wing habit of being genuinely shocked to learn that someone they already know and like is a conservative. Their starting point is high. People can be disqualified, can fall, can go down the hill, but the presumption runs toward trust until something knocks it down.

The right starts from an older and harder assumption. In their view, the floor of human behavior is extremely low, and this assumption is validated when you interact with the general adult public, as most right-wingers do, after their parents and the schools have had eighteen to twenty-five years to work on them. IQ is scarce. Virtue is scarcer. Skill at iterated games is scarcest of all, to the point where when you meet someone who has such things you ask which wise and unusual parent or mentor is the reason for this strange unicorn appearing in your world. A rational response to that distribution, of IQ, virtue, and relational skill, is to wall out much of the world. This is the case (and it is a good and reasonable one) for the right-wing instincts about borders, boundaries, and the right to exclude.

But it must be emphasized that there is a danger waiting on this side too, a sin of despair. It says your only move is to wall out the bad, that you can neither grow good people nor go and find more of them. No successful culture in history believed that, and it is the achievements of successful cultures that built the world we live in and want to hand down to our posterity.

The antidote to purity spiraling is to recognize that systems calibrated fairly and run honestly can sort people, and this is easy to verify. Families, and the right kind of business entities, can form and promote from within. Unless you believe God scatters insight and virtue at random among a few souls who can never meet or coordinate, one or both of these strategies can produce almost any combination of traits you can rigorously define. I am asking the right to do nothing more than take its own claims about the heritability of IQ and the formation of character seriously.

In online chat-rooms where this sort of thing takes place, the rejoinder to an observation of the type above is that it is the first and favorite tool of liberalism to forbid us to exclude, to discriminate, to draw the very distinctions that sorting requires. Even if we grant the legal claim for the sake of argument (though conceding the field to the lawfare pirates is neither moral nor actually necessary), there is still a solution that will be obvious once I point it out.

I am referring to the tiered structure the managerial world already runs on. If you can build a series of boxes, tests, and roles, each one supported from deeper in the structure, each one performing a small piece of real work and a large piece of trust-verification or character-illumination, then the whole can judge a player through the narrow part of the game he is currently being allowed to touch. This type of corporate group structure is all over our world, because it is the preferred and necessary legal and organizational structure to have any kind of standards or quality control at all.

The point I am driving at is this. The purpose behind building walls, barriers, and obstacles is to verify, to sort, to find the parties with whom cooperation is finally rational. The low-trust skepticism is a means and never an end. A man who checks and checks and never extends has let his fear govern him and is not serving either himself or the heritage that he claims to treasure.

I will assume my audience already grasps why the leftist strategy (trust and never verify) is a civilizational failure mode. Extending trust is only rational where there is some basis for believing cooperation will be repaid, and that basis is the local ratio of honest players to predators. Meursault’s game-theoretic model is one that I am finding increasingly useful for getting conversations on this topic started. He models a population as three competing strategies. A Believer trusts by default and spends nothing on checking. A Skeptic verifies first and pays for it in time and suspicion. A Liar lives off the Believers, and in a trusting town his con spreads like fire through dry grass, because in the model, every door he knocks on opens. Meursault works out where the mix settles, and in the undifferentiated mass of an open society (which, for our sins, we currently live in) he puts it near seventy Believers and twenty Skeptics for every ten Liars, with that verifying fifth dragging the whole community down to something close to half the output it could reach if no one had to check. Meursault’s analysis is valuable, and necessary to have in the back of your mind in the world built by globalism after the “end of history,” which increasingly resembles a series of glass rooms which anyone can enter and exit at will.

By “the end of history” I do not mean only Fukuyama’s geopolitics. One of the terminal features of globalism is its hostility to iteration, the conviction that personal histories ought to be wiped clean, that past sins should never be held against the sinner and past deeds should never earn anyone a lasting claim. Note of course that one conspicuous exception is the left-wing academic chasing tenure.

I have described Managerial Financialism, the dominant economic framework of our day, as the belief that the value of frictionlessly trading ever more abstract representations of real goods and services will always exceed the cost of the gap between the abstraction and the reality. On the whole the belief holds. The benefit of the arbitrage of frictionless abstractions does outperform the friction it ignores, except of course for the one week in every seven to ten years when the system crashes.

Managerial socialism, the social principle of that same managerial order, is the matching belief that the value of letting a man hit a reset button, shed his debts, and re-enter the market as a null actor will always exceed the cost of leaving his future productivity tied to his past obligations. I have just described the business model of most private equity firms. Both halves of managerialism run on one shared denial, that the accumulated history between people, the very stuff trust is made of, can be abstracted away at no cost.

All of this has an old name. Aristotle taught that courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness, and Nelson Hultberg, in The Golden Mean (Hultberg), sharpened the point that matters here: the mean is not a halfway house between two poles but a third and positive thing, with a vice standing on either side of it. The man who trusts everyone has fallen off the rash side of that virtue, and the open society is rashness written into law. The man who trusts no one has fallen off the timid side and dressed his fear in the language of discipline.

These are both civilizational failure modes, and we must reassert Aristotle’s old understanding of what makes things work. The left-wing extends cooperation it never verifies (even after the most heinous of bad behavior). The other verifies endlessly, without ever extending the trust necessary to actually build things. In the final analysis you need some degree of trust, in God if in nothing else, to sow seeds and wait for a harvest.

III. The PhD and the Day Laborer

The first thing we need to trust in is the capacity of people to be sorted, and that moral agents are indeed capable of sort. Let’s think about two very different sorts of men. Hire a day laborer from a parking lot at six in the morning and you know nothing about the man in front of you. The pool is unsorted. He may be a master craftsman, a thief, a drunk, or among the more reliable workers you might employ, and nothing you can see tells you which. The rational play is low-trust: pay by the day, count your tools, watch the work, assume nothing. That is an honest answer to high variance and zero information, and it carries no contempt for the man.

The doctoral student in a serious (read STEM) program is (or historically was) the opposite case. By the time someone sits in that seminar, they have passed through hundreds, possibly thousands, of sequential filters. Grades across twelve years of school. Standardized tests. Recommendation letters. Admissions committees. Major requirements. Faculty endorsements. A qualifying exam. Every one of those gates is imperfect, and many are noisy or biased, but that is not the point. Assuming that the tiered sorting mechanisms have roughly the same ethical framework, and by the end of it you get someone who is very far down the tail of the bell-curve of the morality that the mechanism was designed to select for.

So high trust is a privilege manufactured by sorting, and it lasts exactly as long as the sorting that made it is honestly enforced. Rome built the cursus honorum on this understanding, a ladder that tested a man at each rung before granting him the next, so that the trust shared among the men at the top was the compounded output of every filter beneath them.

The reason I bring this up is that sorting works. If you ask people what matters to them they will tell you. If you ask them to do symbolic actions, their eagerness or disgust will accurately inform you of their predilections and biases. While there are exceptions (some percentage of the population is genuinely sociopathic), those do not rise to the top unless you have multiple sequential gates with sorting requirements that represent opposite and competing moralities, and a culture would have to be unbelievably stupid to allow that to happen (oh wait...).

IV. What Happens When You Stop Believing in Sorting

The modern right (with good reason) overwhelmingly believes the gates themselves have been captured. This is fine as it is an accurate representation of reality. But the modern right also increasingly believes that gates are inherently left-wing, that sorting “does not work” and that it is not possible to build games that will reliably identify the bad actors in order that they might be removed. They even sometimes begin to believe that the only purpose of gates and sorting rooms is to concentrate the repugnant qualities of their enemies. This leads to a poisonous hermeneutic of suspicion.

I watch the pattern repeat across the contemporary right. Having assembled a screened, vetted, like-minded community, the members go on treating one another as suspects. They reach for rigid hierarchy where trust would serve them better. They re-verify what the sorting already verified. They keep one hand on the weapon in a room where each man present has passed the same test. Edward Banfield, who spent nine months in a dirt-poor village in the south of Italy and wrote it up in *The Moral Basis of a Backward Society* (1958), found the same reflex in low-trust places, where even the weak preferred a hard, hierarchical order because unchecked local predation was the main alternative they had ever known. He recorded the price of it too. Where many families assumed the next family would cheat them, no one cooperated outside the nuclear family, so the roads, the firms, the credit, and the common projects that build wealth never began, and the village stayed poor for generations for no reason but the missing trust. That is the wall-builder’s end state scaled to a society. When the high-trust players are gone and no one will move first, the prosperity the wall was raised to protect is often not created at all.

V. What Causes the Breakdown

Why does this happen? Part of the answer is temperament. The disposition that builds and guards a wall is vigilance. The man who is good at constructing a closed system is, by selection, a high-verifier, a Skeptic in Meursault’s sense, with detection machinery that never turns off. That machinery is what wall-building and wall-guarding demand, and it is the very thing high-trust play forbids. To ask the watchman to extend unguarded trust inside the gate is to ask him to abandon the disposition that built the gate. A man who spent years learning to see threats keeps seeing them after the fence goes up.

Another part is structural, a coordination problem. High trust is a multiplayer equilibrium. Believer play is a successful strategy only when enough others are playing it too. The first man to lower his guard in a room that has not yet committed to trust is the one who gets fleeced. A space full of vigilant people holds very few reliable trusters to reciprocate an opening move, so no one makes the opening move. Everyone waits for proof of safety that can only arrive after someone has already gone first. You see this in right-wing donor conversations, where small and great alike chatter about the bad experiences they have had, usually in incredibly thin relational contexts. A gate and sorting mechanism can remove predators. It cannot manufacture the simultaneous, voluntary lowering of guard that a high-trust game actually requires. That has to be chosen, and a community selected for never choosing it stays locked in a low-trust stasis long after the danger has passed.

VI. The Meta-Skill of Trust

A competent player (and we should aspire to be competent players) lives between the two failures. He does not extend trust everywhere, because much of the world is an unsorted parking lot and the open-society fantasy gets people robbed. He does not withhold it everywhere, because a life spent verifying inside spaces that already earned trust runs at half output, and a walled house that no one inside it will trust is just an expensive prison. The skill is to read the local ratio, build or seek the gates that change it, and then, once the sorting has done its work, find the nerve to play the game the gates made possible.

That last move is the one both wings miss, in opposite directions. The left wants the harvest of a high-trust society without tending the field that grows it. The right tends the field with great discipline and then will not sit down to eat. Knowing which game you are in is half the meta-skill. Being willing to actually play it, once you know, is the half almost no one practices, and it is worth more than either reflex alone.

VII. The End of the Dark Ages

Which brings me back to Kells, and to the conversation that I have with my children every time they watch it. The danger that Cellach was guarding against was very real, and unfortunately, simple faith in books led to tragedy again and again.

We call that succession of tragedies the Dark Ages, and the name is not just propaganda. It was a dark time. The West had not yet learned how to build walls that worked: not merely piles of stone around an abbey, but law, jurisdiction, and the will to enforce them. Vikings came from the north and burned what they could reach. Later, Muslim armies came from the south and did the same. Monasteries that should have been libraries became charnel houses. Men paid blood price for murder and called it peace. For centuries the Church opposed capital punishment, “peace and charity” sat atop the legal order, and even serious crimes were settled in private concords that looked like mercy and functioned like impunity. The wicked were not punished. The good did not live in peace.

The lack of justice was not limited to violent crimes. There was also a gross amount of immorality. Around 1051 Peter Damian sent Pope Leo IX the Liber Gomorrhianus, a treatise against the sexual corruption of the clergy. Damian did not write about abstract decadence. He wrote about priests and monks in active sin, including the abuse of boys entrusted to their care, and about superiors who knew and would not act. The men at the top preached forgiveness while predators kept their offices. Northern Christians built what defenses they could and still got raided, paid compensation, and (at the behest of cruel and corrupt priests) forgave again and again.

But if you know anything about what comes next in the history of the West, you know we solved it. That is the part they do not want you to study when they tell you the Middle Ages were nothing but filth and superstition. In the eleventh century Church and State reached the consensus that the wicked should be punished so the good may live in peace. As Peter Frost and Henry C. Harpending document in “Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification”: for nearly seven centuries they Christendom went on to execute its criminals at a rate of roughly one to two percent every generation.

The Thomistic reform turned institutional rot from something to massage into something to purge. Clerical discipline became load-bearing again. Law acquired teeth. And then, over the centuries that followed, the West learned how to combine what the men of Kells could not: walls in service of the book, not instead of it. Castles that made farmland legible and defensible. Cathedrals that turned stone into catechism. Early universities that turned education into a ladder those with sufficient IQ could climb in principle. Libraries and scriptoria that mastered new techniques for copying and preserving texts until they finally were able to spread their core canon to a shockingly large amount of outputs across Christendom. High medieval Christendom was not perfect. It was not gentle by modern lights. But it was, for the first time a Christianity which took seriously the need to protect that which God had entrusted to it. A monastery became what it was always meant to be: a library with walls around it, and in many beautiful ways, Europe as a whole became such a library.

The harvest of that synthesis is the proof that the outcomes we fear are not inevitable. Europe did not stumble out of the Dark Ages by accident. It climbed out because men recognized that we need both books and walls, and the transformation that books create works best in a stable calm walled garden. We learned that worked stone, built by men who were transformed by the Book, could build those magnificent structures that come down to us today as cathedrals.

In Conclusion, we all know now that the open society will not work (though many of us should have known much earlier). But we have to retain hope that we can seize control of various gates and rooms, that each one that we and others like us control matters, that each contributes to our ability to build rooms in which we can once again engage in high-trust activities. I teach my children that if they stay within the rooms that I build, and guard, and purify by my life and work, if they keep the inheritance that I am building for them, then one day they will build cathedrals. And I encourage all of you to do the same.

“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.”

-Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapter 2

Recently the Economist published a provocative image as the headline of its article which is undoubtedly AI generated. “The Mythos moment. Can five men be trusted with AI?” I have not reproduced the image here due to the litigiousness of that institution. But AI describes it as “five tech founders are rendered as Greek statuary, casually holding laptops above an indistinct sea, while a small figure on the shore looks up.”

The cover is meant to mock, to imply arrogance and hubris on the part of the AI founders and to suggest that the proper response to that hubris is institutional restraint. What the Economist’s editors do not seem to recognize is the role they are setting themselves up to play in the social drama the image anticipates. They have drawn the founders as demigods; as Prometheus stealing fire from the heavens. The tone of the article is implicitly demanding that Elon, Altman and Dario be chained to a rock so that an eagle can devour their livers on a daily basis. Presumably those worthies at the Economist have not asked themselves what happens to people who make a habit of chaining demigods.

Another interpretation of the image is that we are about to, and in some sense are already having, a Renaissance. A Renaissance, in the sense relevant here, is the flowering of productivity and creativity that accompanies a new set of technologies producing wealth outside the constrained order of the prior social arrangement. The most recent example was the Italian Renaissance, whose innovations in books, banking, navigation, measurement, mechanical arts, and urban production led to the Industrial Revolution.

The AI era will produce a Renaissance in the same technical sense, a reshaping of who gets to do what and who lives where on the strength of which technologies, and the institutional structures that will define the next century will be very different from the ones the Economist is gesturing toward. To be clear, I think that on the whole, and once the dust has cleared, things WILL be better, basic goods will be cheaper and/or higher quality, formerly intractable diseases will be cured, and human lifespan will (on average) increase, just as it has for the previous Renaissances that upended Western Civilization. But that does not answer the question of what shape our world will have and how many of our current structures will collapse (remember the collapse of seemingly impregnable structures is what causes all that dust!)

There are three points I want to make in this essay.

First, the modern democratic experiment did not escape Aristotle’s old cycle. Aristotle’s cycle says that democracy leads to tyranny because “the people” (the voting majority) will demand a more and more powerful state to oppress the productive and redistribute their stuff. A very unusual combination of technologies in the last Renaissance meant that the increases in productivity that came from new technology actually pushed power down the hierarchy (leading to the idea of the Renaissance Man). However, empowering the people did not actually produce the kind of social uplift that the Enlightenment thinkers hoped for and in any event those “democratic” technologies have run their course and now increasingly struggle to provide basic services. In the light of that fragility, the AI Renaissance (any Renaissance) will break that order. AI here is the avalanche that broke the camel’s back. But the central government’s ability to continue to produce basic services, food, power, water, communications, education (especially for the STEM fields necessary to keep the technical system going) is heavily compromised and needs to be replaced with SOMETHING.

Second, AI is an aristocratic technology in the sense that it rewards deep mastery rather than mere competence, and mastery is always concentrated in a fairly narrow band of the population. Average users will see an increase in productivity in 50% to 1.5X, while peak users may see 10X, 50X, or even 100X increases. This means that the floor (the productivity of the bottom 90%) will rise only slightly, while the ceiling, (the productivity of the top performers) will go up MUCH MUCH more. This will tend to push power up the hierarchy. To be clear we have seen (and integrated) similar technologies in the West before, and the rumors of the “permanent underclass” assume that people will not respond rationally to new incentives (which has never been true before). This does not mean that there will not be better and worse solutions that will be implemented.

Third, if AI is aristocratic in the sense described, the Great House will become the most economically and civilizationally important institution of the coming dispensation. By Great House, we mean the multi-generational household built around wholistic formation, mission, and covenantal obligation. What has functioned for most of the democratic-industrial period as a defensive shelter against entropy will, in the AI Renaissance, function as a productive engine for forming the kind of people civilizations have historically required when concentrated capability has had to be channeled toward responsible ends.

Democratic Technologies and the Myth of the Renaissance Man

Before we can talk about what is likely to happen, we have to discuss the most recent time that a Renaissance happened, and the assumptions that it left us with. The Italian Renaissance, starting in the 15th and 16th centuries, sparked by the firearm, the printing press, and the textile mill, along with an assorted set of improvements in chemistry is what laid the foundation ultimately for industrialization and the modern world. The dominant character of that Renaissance was the Renaissance Man, the sovereign individual who, armed with books, scholarship, and access to the ideas the medieval order had reserved for clerics, could in principle better himself through education and rise to any station. The dream was framed in deliberate opposition to the medieval ideal that placed each person in a divinely ordained calling fitted to his nature, and the political program that followed from it was that any man given the printing press and the school could fix any problem at any level of any organization. The expectation was that everyone would rise up and attain to the level of minor aristocrats, and the British Gentry and the American colonies (where there was something like 97% literacy rates) really looked like that might be achievable for a bit.

The reality conformed less to the dream and more to the ancient pattern of governmental shifts laid out by Aristotle. The aspiring Renaissance Men turned out, in the aggregate, to be populists with low tastes and low capacity. Bettering oneself turned out to be hard, perhaps even miraculous, and when reality failed to conform to the expectation, the Renaissance Striver class turned to the government to fix it. The government was happy to oblige. Five centuries later, roughly nine out of ten descendants of the West are wage-slaves with less ownership opportunities (but MUCH more comfortable chains) than the slaves of the major textile centers of Imperial Rome, the principal upgrade being that the gladiatorial games and pornographic rites of our modern Empire can now be streamed from anywhere. They are even, in a magnificent historical irony being subject to violence and denied the right to self-defense against remarkably similar barbarian populations. Philosophers and social scientists have made much of the fact that we did not escape Aristotle’s cycle. The cycle says that monarchy decays into tyranny, tyranny into aristocracy, aristocracy into oligarchy, oligarchy into democracy, and democracy into a kind of disordered mass rule that begs for a new monarch to restore order. This is clearly true, but I want to highlight how it was a shift in the underlying technologies that we use that drove much of this outcome of the modern democratic experiment.

Aristocratic and Democratic Technologies

One of the things I am doing on this Substack is making the argument that our society was designed for democratic technologies but is now wholly dependent upon aristocratic technologies for its core tech base. The reason I use the democratic and aristocratic terminology (despite much pushback) is because there are two possibilities for any technology and they have dramatically different requirements in what management structure is required to use and monetize the technology without violating our moral intuitions.

The first type of technology is one that requires (or benefits from) the mobilization of MASSIVE amounts of unskilled or “generally educated” labor. Most of these technologies in the last 400 years involved machines that rewarded competence, with very little additional compensation for skill above the competence mark. This meant very short training times (always under 2 years, and frequently less than 6 weeks), before the worker was able to “pay for himself.” This ability to do economically beneficial labor in a relatively short time (almost always in circumstances when MASSIVE amounts of capital had been invested in some “means of production”) is what created the concept of “entry level jobs.” As I have discussed previously, the “entry level job” is a historical anomaly.

When the underlying tech base has these core features the moral way (and the verdict of history would seem to suggest) the most EFFECTIVE way to mobilize the large amounts of labor necessary to scale the industrial projects (and to pay for all that sunk capital), is to give the workers broad and largely equal voting rights in the core institutions that govern their life. Those voting rights are restrained only by a thin and very unpopular financial elite who focus on the narrow goal of getting their money back (and insulating it from the inflation of modern fiat currencies) rather than taking any interest (or any responsibility) for how society at large is governed.

We should note that “generally educated” is a term of art, and one that has been stretched further and further as our current governance structures attempt to retain power on top of a tech base and less and less resembles the scenario for which they were created. There are REAL differences between a scenario where “generally educated” implies a high school diploma v. a bachelors degree. With sufficient social effort, that difference was capable of being papered over by a combination of lowered college entrance standards and the slopification of office work. When “generally educated” began to mean (as it has indeed begun to mean) a Masters degree or Ph.D. that proposition creates an the underlying imbalance that is much more resistant to being papered over. The idea of a mass labor force of Ph.Ds is a jarring one and folks, like the intrepid Eric Weinstein, start asking what is going on. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Because there is ANOTHER type of technology. And that is any technology that requires highly specialized personnel with deep mastery and/or institutional knowledge. Bonus points if only a relatively small percentage of the population can master it, it takes a long time to master, or if the technology requires idiosyncratic or individualized instruction. One of the key features of an aristocratic technology (this being the inverse of the entry level jobs effect) is that there is usually no short-term economic benefit to the group that employs the trainee during the long, difficult, and uncertain training process. We are uncomfortable with technologies that fit this profile because they imply a hierarchy and a social structure for managing that hierarchy that conflicts with our way of life.

The virtuous way to manage these types of technologies is to allow the peak operators, the men (and to be clear it is overwhelming men in point of fact) who have completed that long, difficult, and uncertain training process to have control of the education, financial, and social institutions that are training the next generation. This is not, to put it mildly, what we have done.

What exactly is a Machinist?

I should note that one of the problems with understanding our situation is that we gave names to technologies when they were in a democratic phase, and we have now mostly automated away all of the democratic uses of those technologies. Take the quintessential “competent machine user,” the machinist or lathe operator. In Henry Ford’s day, machinists were doing rote, repetitive work where they received a piece in EXACTLY the same condition, and made EXACTLY the same cuts every single time. Simple jigs could be used, and while attention to detail was critical, the work was not one that was that hard to learn or required much in the way of IQ. Indeed surprisingly low IQ individuals with high degrees of conscientiousness could pull their weight on the line or factory floor.

Today however, all such jobs have been ENTIRELY automated, and a 20-year machinist or lathe operator is a treasured artisan used to recreate by hand parts for specialized machines for which an industrial supply chain largely no longer exists. One of the reasons that these “master machinists” are so treasured and so valuable is that there are essentially no junior machinists, the rote repetitive work that built the deep mastery over their tools is now done by inputting CAD instructions into a computer. As I said earlier this “lack of entry level jobs” is a key indicator of an aristocratic technology stack, and we were VERY far down that path in most industries long before AI was a glimmer in Andrej Karpathy’s eye.

But we still THINK of machinists and “factory jobs” as things that reward mass labor, that “anyone with a high school education” should be able to learn to do in 2 years or less, and be relatively highly compensated for, certainly enough to afford housing, spouse, and children. We think of them as technologies that push power DOWN the hierarchy, and assume that any collection of power UP the hierarchy must be illegitimate and “corrupt.” We assume that democratic social structure with their ability to incorporate and persuade the largest possible set of actors to voluntarily participate in the system will produce the best set of outcomes. That WAS the case in Henry Ford’s America, it is not the case now. But our system has been able to obscure, to “manage,” the differences between the “machinist” of Henry Ford’s day, and the
“Machinist” CAD user on the one hand, and the master lathe operator on the other, roles which have very little in common with each other and almost nothing to do with assembly line lathe operator upon whom our assumptions about the right social management structure are based.

As it stands the ONLY way to get another master machinist is to give an existing master machinist a group of trainees (the guild records from the medieval period suggested 3-8) and to HEAVILY incentivize (with social and political power if necessary) that master machinist to turn at least one of those trainees into a master machinist. Given that these autistically optimized master craftsman are not generally the best teachers, this is usually done by trying to get the trainees to imitate their master in EVERY respect, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, rather than by having a narrow curriculum.

One of the things that I want to drive home here is that scale of this problem is far larger than AI. In the current scenario our system is increasingly dependent on a very narrow class of producers who grow essentially all of the food, produce essentially all of the power, run essentially all of the key machines, maintain the industrial systems nobody else understands, and invent basically everything. The US military is increasingly the same families; in 2012-2013 86% of the Air Force, 82% of the Navy, 79% of the Army, and 77% of the Marines were were from “military families” with close relatives serving before them. Oil companies and their employees famously are a world unto themselves. I have served oil industry clients and I can tell you from personal experience that even the traditional relationships between engineering schools and the oil industry is tense if not fractured. Again, the recognition that general education pathways are not serving our producers is a discussion had if at all in hushed tones, because the political implications are obvious.

Democracy sits tenuously atop this concentrated productive class. The supply chains for nuclear power plants, the oil and gas, fighter jets, semiconductor fabrication, satellite networks, grid-scale transformers, and other high-consequence technologies are not coterminous with society at large. They are narrow, technical, and intensely personal, carried by operators whose judgment and culture is increasingly incompatible with pop culture, public opinion, or large-scale credentialing systems.

This structural incompatibility makes contact with society at large a source of drag, delay, and liability. The farmer, engineer, founder, machinist, soldier, oil rigger, grid operator, and plant manager increasingly meet the public in forums such as hearings, lawsuits, compliance departments, which they quite correctly interpret as a humiliation ritual. Given the timing of this shift (largely during the Cold War) the first generation of this artificial control may have been done with good intentions by relatively competent people. But it is now essentially a series of moral denunciations issued by people who cannot perform the productive work being governed. We are a corpulent state, and our bones are creaking under the strain.

So how have we maintained “our democracy” in the midst of the hollowing out and undermining of the core pieces of our democratic tech base? How have we retained the symbols of democratic power, even when the natural state of technologies would give rise to a new aristocratic class? Well by implementing the solution that Aristotle says democracies ALWAYS engage in when they grow corrupt, which is to turn to a monarch to suppress the rising aristocrats and maintain the privileges of a less and less competent democratic mass.

Now, “our democracy” prides itself on being a “no kings” system, but an analysis of our legal system shows an interesting continuation of the most important of the monarchic privileges. The distinctive characteristic of a monarch was his ability to shield his personal assets from liability by claiming sovereign immunity. And where does that power lie now? Well with essentially every government actor down to the lowest police officer and bureaucrat.

The invention of the Westphalian nation-state gave the state itself (along with all of its smaller subsidiary corporations states, counties, cities, etc) this privilege. You can be an incredibly wasteful city manager or mayor leaving the taxpayers burdened with millions or billions in debt, and walk away scot free with no personal liability for your actions. Again, only kings enjoyed such privilege in the ancién regime. Over the last ~150 years we have even extended a form of sovereign immunity to every director and CEO of a corporate structure through corporate limited liability. Initially, this extension of limited liability was seen as a de facto monopoly, and was limited to corporate entities that were pursuing a clear governmental purpose and required a full deliberative act of the king or sovereign legislature in question.

But now, through statues of general incorporation and the ability of corporations to own other corporations, this has become widespread. While in theory piercing the corporate veil is possible, unless there is gross criminal behavior, a la Enron, those responsible walk. This commonality of experience, the ability to foist poor decision-making off on the people, while paying no price other than the loss of their position, has become the defining feature of the so-called managerial class. These people, raised at the same handful of schools, paid on the same compensation curves, and bound by the same career-survival logic are the collective monarch of our corporatist age, and their insulation from personal liability has produced more and more incompetence the longer we have run this experiment. If you wish you could call them oligarchs, many of them often become so. But they become so because they can make ANY decision, implement ANY policy, and so long as they can justify it in terms of “fortifying our democracy” it will be supported, and upheld, and they will bear NO personal responsibility for the downstream consequences to the economy, the legal system, or the objective stability of the system itself. This is why you see references to the managerial consensus and why they take such pains to present themselves as neutral impersonal actors. These people collectively are inhabiting a role which earlier societies limited to one person at a time.

This is because monarchs are plunderers who do not actually produce anything, which is problematic even when the monarchy is small (usually one man as Hobbes articulates) and works best when there there is a broad productive democratic class who are available for plundering (successful aristocrats generally spend much of their power becoming more and more plunder-resistant). It is catastrophic when there are entire legions of these leaches, whose only justification is that they preserve the increasingly irrelevant forms of “our democracy.” To be clear I use irrelevant in the sense that the modern democratic form does not (and structurally cannot) actually produce the food, power, water or any of the basic services needed to sustain the population.

The centralized monarchical (managerial) consensus uses its power in the way sovereigns have always used their power, to suppress the productive aristocratic class. The suppression is largely symbolic in the sense that it does not lead to the democratization of power. It is, however, an incredibly effective tool for preventing the successful producers from implementing ANY kind of social or political change. They are, and they are constantly reminded that they MUST remain, subservient to the managerial class who are insulated from all personal liability for their actions. The symbolic suppression flatters the masses into crying for the state to accrete to itself more power which is the entire point of the exercise. And to be clear, without this constant and omni-present State redistribution of social, political, and economic power, there would be an IMMEDIATE imposition of hierarchies that would make the tribal corruption of voting systems in Africa look like amateurs. This is the entire function of our democratic order. It is the core purpose and justification of our regulatory state.

The AI Renaissance is going to break that order. As I said in the intro, AI is the avalanche, the landslide that broke the camel’s back. Other technologies started off as largely democratic and social inertia has kept those assumptions in play while leading to “personnel shortages” that will surprise no one who has studied the laws of supply and demand. But the speed of AI adoption will in my view change the balance of power between the productive elite (aristocrats) and the managerial elites (the oligarchs, collective monarch) in ways that cannot be managed without banning the technology itself. While there will be some group of AOC-IQ level persons who will attempt to ban the data centers and then the models themselves, the serious players in our system appear very cognizant of what will happen if we ban AI and China, or even Russia does not. The compliance apparatus that has kept the old order intact will not survive the gap that AI will open between productive elites and the rest of the labor market. I, of course, frame that gap by saying that AI is a very Aristocratic Technology, maybe the most aristocratic we have ever seen.

AI as an Aristocratic Technology

My thesis is that Aristocratic technologies reward an operator’s dedication to mastery. So what are the notable features of AI.

According to ChatGPT:

The IMF has warned that if AI complements high-income workers and raises returns to capital, productivity gains could disproportionately increase the incomes of high earners and asset owners, worsening inequality. Harvard Business School research found that generative AI boosts productivity but does not turn novices into experts, implying that people with existing expertise may be better able to convert AI assistance into high-quality output. Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen has argued that AI could turn the old “10x engineer” into a “100x engineer,” especially because it benefits already high-performing engineers by removing low-value work. GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke similarly argued that AI can “10x” individual developers and make teams dramatically more productive, while still requiring deep engineering knowledge. Sam Altman has predicted that AI could enable a one-person billion-dollar company, which is a vivid example of the productivity ceiling rising far more than the average worker’s output. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that powerful AI could accelerate biological discovery by at least 10x, compressing 50–100 years of progress into 5–10 years, which supports the idea that elite labs and researchers may gain enormous leverage.

Now, there are also claims that AI raises everyone below a certain threshold up to its automated standard. While reports conflict, let us say that this is able to allow EVERYONE in the bottom half of the population to behave at a 100 IQ level. This would be an enormous improvement in the general quality of life for those people. But this is because they are being managed by AI. It is the AI doing the top level work, and the person is more or less feeding information into the AI. Now this might result in an increase in their personal productivity in 1.5-2X for the lowest band of the population. (Please note, I will argue below that this may NOT have the economic impact those folks are hoping for). It will result in marginally 25%, 50% increases in productivity for the current average performers. But it will result in 10X, 50X, 100X increases in productivity at the high end, and as we have seen in the AI developer compensation reporting that results in truly STAGGERING economic rewards.

What does all of this mean? The floor for average users will rise modestly while the ceiling for skilled operators will rise dramatically, and the gap between a skilled operator using AI and an unskilled operator using AI will be substantially larger than the gap between two operators with no AI at all.

There is a metaphor, and one I use with caution, because there is an immediate and tempting way to use this incorrectly. I have set out at length the broader argument for why the unique character of horse-riding aristocracy is never coming back in Chivalry Is Dead. But in many ways I believe that the economic and social impact of AI will be similar to the impact of the warhorse.

The horse was the technology that defined European aristocracy for the better part of a thousand years. Horses came with key asymmetries: Access to elite breeding lines, the capital required to maintain a war-grade animal, and the years of training required to bring a horseman to the level of instinct were available only to a narrow class, and that class controlled the political and economic life of the continent until firearms eventually neutralized the multiplicative advantage. A man on foot with a spear would generally lose to two men with spears, but a trained knight on a quality warhorse would routinely cut apart dozens of badly trained horsemen on lower-quality animals let alone men on foot. This multiplicative advantage compounded not just with years of training, but with the generations of optimization for a particular build, strength, and agility level. The fact that the peasants acquired horses (and eventually figured out how to use them productively) was never enough, and was never GOING to be enough to overcome the entrenched advantage of the martial class. Individual peasants could acquire wealth, horses, and nobility (not always in that order), but as a group the peasant class could NEVER compete with the noble class.

This is also why giving barbarians horses became a method for inducting them into the same set of social classes that governed the medieval period. Many largely egalitarian tribes, the Goths, Franks, Saxons, and Normans all came into Europe, got ahold of horses and very quickly (in civilizational terms) adopted the same hierarchical conventions as the REST of the horse-riding cultures, and were integrated into Europe on that basis. The Mongols (yes I can hear you screaming) are the exception that proves the rule. Horsemen from an incredibly harsh environment that required constant mobility and prevented the accumulation of landed wealth (such as the Mongols), might resist the hierarchical impulse, but their tribal assemblies were very different from the modern one citizen, one vote system, and when they got into better climates (central China, the Middle East) they likewise developed similar entrenched feudal structures.

There is an argument that the high capital cost of frontier models, and the relatively low budget way to imitate those models in a self-hosted capacity, is structurally similar (from a capital investment perspective) to the way that southern European elites required MASSIVE wealth for breeding projects, but once larger warhorse lineages existed, relatively low-capital actors (like the Normans) could acquire and maintain similar capacity for a fraction of the upfront cost of the breeding project. Then as the similarity between the experience of Norman horseman managing their artisans and farmers, penetrated through the social structure, they came to feel a kinship with other horseman managing artisans and farmers across Europe. If AI gives a unified set of experiences to the new aristocrats who will become increasingly necessary to those basic services, we WILL see a social impact from that alignment of interest and core experiences.

This is not to say that the character of the men formed by “riding” AI will be the same as the character of the men formed by riding horses. The technologies are too different at their cores. The chivalric virtues that horsemanship selected for, and especially the way that mastery of the horse overlapped with the skillset for seducing women and leading men, are unlikely to be the virtues AI naturally selects for; though the malleability of AI means there may be some interesting possibilities to “force” that sort of virtue selection (more on that in a future post).

But likely the character formed by AI operation will be its own thing and for present purposes, the operative point is that the social impact of the small lift in the floor and the large lift in the ceiling holds even when the technology and the personality quirks it produces are novel will likely stratify our society.

The Key Example: Compliance

One of the key ways that AI will change the balance of power between local elites and the system at large is compliance. The monarchic state’s primary instrument of control over the aristocratic class is not in fact taxation or break-up action; it is regulation, and the cost of complying with regulation. Securities filings, regulatory submissions, tax compliance, employment-law compliance, environmental-impact reporting, occupational-licensing paperwork, foreign-asset disclosure, state-by-state nexus tracking — the compliance apparatus is the lattice through which the monarch keeps the aristocrats dependent on the bureaucratic class that interprets the rules. These costs have historically been a key part of “regulatory capture”. A 20th Century Fortune 500 firm absorbed compliance overhead as a routine line item, while a one-person operation could not afford the lawyers, accountants, and consultants required to operate cleanly inside the system. The cost of compliance is what has kept the smaller would-be aristocrats from organizing the kind of independent operations that would actually challenge the incumbents.

AI will collapse most of those costs. Instead of massive law firms, with hundreds or thousands of lawyers, a single AI startup, run by a skeleton crew will likely empower tens of thousands of businesses to make securities filings, manage tax compliance, write employment policies, and handle regulatory submissions at a cost the managerial class cannot match and on a timeline the bureaucracy cannot keep up with. The compliance lattice will not disappear but the 20 man, 50 man, and 200 man corporation which is big enough to regulate but not too big to fail may become viable long-term for the first time since the New Deal.

But people will say, “What about the floor? AI is going to give hundred of millions, maybe billions of people access to never-before seen problem-solving capacity.” I do not deny that there will be a lift in the floor productivity of humans in the AI era; I do not even deny that housing, and other core goods will grow cheaper (partly from actual productive increases and partly by clever evasion of the regulatory state enabled by AI). But the important question is not, “What is the floor?” The important question is: “What is the difference between the high performers and the low performers?” If the average person becomes half again as productive, twice as productive or even three times as productive, while the peak users of AI enjoy 50X to 100X increases in productivity we are about to see a difference in relative compensation that will ultimately mean far greater personal power for the peak users than a democracy can successfully manage.

An instructive metaphor is the horse-collar, a humble harness innovation that finally let a horse pull a plow without choking it. First of all, it should be noted that the horse-collar took roughly four centuries to arrive after the war horse had already restructured European aristocracy. There was nothing special about the horse-collar – no underlying technology shift. But none of the entrenched interests were primarily focused on benefitting the peasant classes, and so it lagged behind other horse related technologies. The historical pattern is that the floor-raising application of an aristocratic technology lags behind the aristocratic application by centuries; the immediate beneficiaries of a powerful new tool are the people already positioned to use it, and the broad democratic benefit, when it arrives, arrives on its own much-slower schedule.

It is worth saying clearly that the shape and timing of the AI floor are far from settled. A great number of the democratic style releases in AI to date have been driven by direct Chinese actions — such as DeepSeek and its successors being open-sourced for geopolitical reasons — or by the implied threat of Chinese action. The Chinese are clearly betting that their political system can absorb the sociological shocks of a rapidly destabilizing AI Renaissance better than the American system can. The bet may turn out to be wrong, but the reasoning behind it is respectable, and the consequence for our purposes is that the timing of the floor’s arrival in any given sector is now a geopolitical variable rather than a market variable. None of this changes the direction this economic logic leads; it changes who controls the speed at which the logic plays out, and it should give pause to any American reader who assumes the floor will be raised on terms favorable to the American institutional order.

And in the short-term I do think that it is actually the increase in the floor, the democratic applications of this emerging technology, that will cause the greatest economic havoc.

When the horse-collar finally arrived its immediate economic effect was severe. The collar made the last remaining Roman-style farming gangs worthless almost overnight. The peasant with a horse-collared draft team simply outproduced the slave-driven latifundia, and the institution that had depended on cheap human labor was undone not by moral reform but by an agricultural input. The AI floor-raising tools will do the same thing on a much faster timeline. The wage-slave who exists today to perform tasks that a business owner with AI access can now perform for free will become economically worthless on the same logic, and a great many people who have built a working life on entry-level and mid-level wage work will discover, over the next several years, that market correction happens slowly and irregularly but their grocery and housing bills arrive precisely on schedule. While I strongly doubt that this will truly create a “permanent underclass” the short-term economic hardship is likely to be severe, and may last for much longer than we hope. I fear that it may last until we as a society admit that certain technologies require a different social structure to manage than we have been using for the last little while.

This is because all of the solutions involve giving those who parent and disciple the next generation of master craftsmen, peak military and productive personnel (which will overwhelmingly involve AI) sufficient social and political power (along with economic resources) to create and maintain the environment in which that next generation of peak users can be not merely trained, but formed into the kinds of people that we can trust to use these powerful technologies. That may look more like the guild master apprentice systems, it may look more like the feudal knighthood structure, it may look more like the spiritual lineages of a medieval scholar or priest. I do not know.

But one thing I do know is that it will NOT look like the prussian “making cogs for the factory floor” method of education that we have been using for the last 150 years. Those methods were developed for technologies that have been relegated by the markets to the dustbin of history. My prediction is that AI, and the conflicts that it engenders will FORCE us to recognize the new balance of power. One observation that I make and will make again, is all of these criticisms of “our democracy” are criticisms of the shifts made in the Civil War, World Wars, and Cold War era away from the Constitutional Republic that our Founders first gave us. Our Constitution is designed (in some ways more designed) for the tech base that we are about to have.

If I am correct, three observable patterns will define this Renaissance over the next several years.

First, the gap in output between high-judgment and low-judgment operators in the same role will widen rather than narrow as the underlying tools mature, so that the more capable the models become, the more the gap between users will grow rather than close.

Second, hiring patterns will shift toward post-training infrastructure, with apprenticeships, internal academies, multi-year formation tracks, and proprietary tacit-knowledge transfer determining which firms compound and which fall behind, and the credential-driven pipeline of the democratic era will stratify as a formation-driven pipeline replaces it.

Third, compensation for AI-leveraged operators will move from wage to equity, profit share, and partnership, while entry-level wages will stagnate or compress, the middle of the wage distribution will hollow, and the top will fragment into firm-specific houses with distinct cultures, formations, and obligations. Indeed, until people recognize that junior labor is necessary as a succession plan (which may take 10-15 years) we may see the elimination of “entry-level” jobs in many industries.

What Would a Great House Renaissance Look Like?

So what will this look like?

The Renaissance of AI will not move the way the printing-press Renaissance moved. The best historical analogue is probably the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries, the renaissance under Charlemagne that established the palace schools, the cathedral scriptoria, and the standardized administrative class that would, over the following centuries, harden into the noble households of medieval Europe. The Carolingian Renaissance largely created the Great Houses of medieval Europe by gathering trained operators around courts that could form them, retain them, and pass their formation on across generations. The AI Renaissance will take the same shape. Institutional energy will gather upward, around households and firms that can form operators across generations, and the cultural ideal of the era will not be the sovereign individual of the printing press but the formed member of a great house. The shape of this Renaissance will be upward.

The upward shift has, in truth, been underway for the better part of a century. The centralizing technologies of the twentieth century — mass production, mass media, mass finance, mass administration — moved economic power back up the ladder steadily and substantially, and democratic social structures and innovation-stifling regulation slowed the shift and obscured its visibility without ever quite stopping it. The cycle of scandal around contemporary elites is, in this reading, the social hierarchy reasserting itself faster than the formal institutions can contain, a process visible at the surface of every news cycle but legible only against the longer arc.

What AI will do, more than create the upward shift, is to take the upward shift that was already underway and make it impossible to disguise. The output gap between peak AI operators and average users will not be something that the credential systems and compensation conventions designed for the prior order can obscure, and the hierarchy that returned decades ago will become visible at exactly the moment the institutions designed to conceal it are losing their grip. The question for everyone watching is what form the visible hierarchy will take.

The visible hierarchy will take one of three forms. It may become extractive, with AI gains captured by a thin managerial-technical layer that owes nothing downward. It may become state-managed, with AI gains captured by the political class and redistributed through nationalism or collective benefit. Or it may become covenantal, with AI gains captured by skilled operators embedded in institutions that owe real obligations to their members, their localities, and their successors.

Of the three, only the covenantal version will be stable across a full generation. The extractive version will produce revolution or authoritarian consolidation. The state-managed version will produce brittleness, because the freedoms required for innovation will be the freedoms the state model must suppress. The covenantal version will produce what civilizations have historically produced when concentrated capability has had to be channeled responsibly: a network of households, firms, congregations, guilds, and localities that train their members, bind them by obligation, and govern themselves with reference to ends beyond extraction.

Critically, the network is not of individuals but of the physical and spiritual lineages, that we have been calling the Great House in its productive form. For most of the democratic-industrial period the Great House has functioned in a defensive register, where an exceptional individual successfully creates wealth in a short-term democratic technology and then the lineage they are now socially permitted to found begins using the household as a preservation vehicle. Trusts, governance documents, philanthropic structures, and prestige management have protected what the family created elsewhere, in scalable industrial and financial systems that sat outside the house and supplied the surplus the house preserved. (I know I’m leaving a lot for the future here, but this article is already over 8,000 words so the details on this idea will have to wait for a later post).

One of the critical points here is that all formation is moral formation. One of the reasons why we cannot have mass produced nuclear technologies or fiat currency issuance is because the consequences of a lack of moral character in the operators would be absolutely catastrophic. These technologies (and AI is FULL of this sort of dilemma) require us to place incredible faith in the moral character of the specific people that wield these powerful technologies. To say that our current educational and credentialing systems are inefficient at producing high-character people massively understates the problem.

This is part of why an AI Renaissance will invert the current training stack. The productive engine will move back inside the household, because the productive bottleneck will move from process to person. The institutions that can absorb the unproductive years of formation, bind capable people by loyalty and mission, transmit tacit knowledge across generations, and steward capital on long horizons will become the institutions that produce the operators of the coming era, and the Great House will return from a position downstream of production to a position upstream of it, generating the human stock the era will reward rather than merely warehousing the gains.

This matters because the coming aristocracy will not merely control luxuries, apps, and speculative financial instruments. They will control (because they are the only ones who can build and operate) the systems through which communities receive food, clean water, power, communications, computation, transport, medical logistics, and machine repair. As those systems become more technically demanding and more AI-leveraged, the only people capable of providing them reliably will be virtuous aristocrats embedded in Great Houses to which they are directly loyal rather than merely economically bound. A contract can purchase services. It cannot purchase the long loyalty required to keep a place alive when the formal system has lost capacity, the regulator has become an obstacle, and the competent operator is deciding where his obligations actually run.

One of the critical things that AI is going to do that other innovations have not, is provide this new class with a common core of experiences (namely interacting with AI interfaces) with the other peak AI users who control the networks, models, launch systems, energy infrastructure, industrial software, robotics, and communications layers on which local resilience depends. The local household that can keep water moving, crops growing, and machines running will need the satellite network, the frontier model, the grid tools, the logistics stack, and the communications channel. The founder who controls those higher layers will need local households capable of making his technology socially legitimate and practically useful inside real places. This is how a hierarchy becomes covenantal rather than extractive: the high operator and the local house discover that their interests converge around service, continuity, and the preservation of competent authority.

Starlink is the cleanest present case. A satellite communications network built and maintained by Elon Musk and his engineers is already the kind of private productive infrastructure the prior political order struggles to classify. It is neither a mere consumer product nor a normal regulated utility. It is a strategic communications layer created by a narrow technical class, dependent on launch capacity, orbital operations, ground stations, chips, software, terminals, and engineering judgment that society at large cannot reproduce. If the government tries to take that network away from Musk and the excellent engineers who built and operate it, the action will not read as ordinary regulation. It will read as sheer robbery, with the state seizing the work of the productive class and then pretending managerial possession is the same thing as productive capacity.

Conclusion

The Economist, in the manner of stopped clocks and blind dogs, has given us a surprisingly accurate visual metaphor for the present situation. The emerging technologies will create a group of men who are formed by them, who share interests in common, and are key in the production of every good or service necessary to life and economic flourishing of the communities in which they reside. The government stepping in between those whose capacity actually produces the food, clean water, power, and other basic services of future communities and the people who are ultimately dependent on those basic services will look more and more like robbery and redistribution (with a healthy dose of managerial style credit stealing thrown in for good measure).

The honest question, then, is whether we will be ruled by demigods or aristocrats. AI will produce peak operators who are functionally demigods: men whose output, reach, and influence exceed the unaided performance of an entire firm. The historical record is clear that this kind of man arrives whether his civilization is ready for him or not. The civilization’s only real choice concerns the institutional setting in which he is formed before the capability is in his hands.

There are two visions of that man. The first is the unmoored individual. He sits inside a glass tower somewhere coastal, runs a portfolio of AI-leveraged operations against a global market, and answers to no one in particular. His wealth is real, his capability is real, and his obligations are always negotiable. He is a Bourbon courtier in waiting, charming and accomplished, with no claim on him stronger than his own preferences. He gives to causes that flatter him, deflects criticism through philanthropy, and treats the people in his region as a market segment rather than a constituency. He is not necessarily evil (though some will be) but he is always unaccountable, and unaccountability has its own logic. But it is far from clear that such logic results in human flourishing.

The second is the Great Man, the true Son of a Great House. He commands the same AI mastery as the first man, but he commands it from within a web of real rights, real obligations, and real people. He is somebody’s son, somebody’s husband, somebody’s neighbor, somebody’s patron. The land he stands on has buried his grandfathers and will receive his sons. The capital he stewards was given to him on the condition that he hand it on, improved, to the next generation. The people he serves live three towns over, attend the same congregation, and will hear within a week if he begins to drift. His powers are oriented not toward the entire world, which he cannot serve, but toward something larger than himself, larger even than his own wife and children: the place, the institution, and the lineage that formed him and that he is now charged with stewarding into the next century.

How do you produce the second man rather than the first? Regulation and general purpose education cannot replace human formation. Selection by credential or test scores measures performance in a given moment rather than the disposition that produces consistency over a lifetime. The Great House does what those instruments cannot. It forms a man before he is powerful, elevates him as the household discovers what he is for, and gives him his duty in life and death. And it is that duty that in the end separates us from both gods and beasts.

So as you consider whether you wish to build or join a Great House, think of this choice. Do you wish to be ruled by arbitrary Demi-gods or Men with a sense of duty to their God, their family, and their House?

If you have read the companion piece on the Becoming Noble Substack, you know the Churchill family’s three-century run on Prestige Finance — the wartime currency, the entail, the Gems Collection, the imperial banking syndicates. Most readers, when they picture what that system produced, stop at the physical result: Blenheim, Capability Brown’s grounds, the rooms built by war currency that served as staging ground for two centuries of deals. But for most people this is where the analysis stops because, in all probability building a family seat, especially a magnificent 1,000 year house like Blenheim, is beyond your means.

But rather than trying to recreate Blenheim in one glorious, capital-intensive framework, what if we analyzed it functionally? What was the family seat for? What did it do?

The surface answer is that Blenheim (like all of its contemporary estates) was an income-producing asset — rents, timber, tenants, pastures, £20,000 a year the family could pledge against loans. While this is not all it was (there was also a training and prestige asset function), the income function is also the most easily replicable for founders in the modern era, and it has a direct modern equivalent.

The Dynasty Trust Is Your Modern Entail

That modern equivalent is a diversified portfolio of high-quality dividend-paying equities and/or fully managed income-producing real estate held inside a properly drafted dynasty trust. It is structurally the same kind of asset the great houses of Prestige Finance borrowed against for three centuries. It is at least as legally protected, administratively simpler, and within reach for a lot more people than the physical seat ever was.

The Prestige Finance loop requires four things from its income-producing core: a non-alienable core the family cannot fumble away; a predictable, pledgeable income stream; a multi-generational legal wrapper; and a credit story that lets the family borrow against the income without ever liquidating the corpus. A dynasty trust holding a diversified dividend equity portfolio delivers all four, with off-the-shelf 21st-century legal plumbing, in any jurisdiction that has abolished or extended the rule against perpetuities.

The non-alienable core is the trust corpus. Beneficiaries do not own it. Their creditors, ex-spouses, and bankrupt grandchildren cannot reach it. The trustee must preserve it across generations. That is not a metaphor for an entail; it is the same legal outcome, expressed in modern trust law.

One of the key things that I want to highlight is that this is a place for genuinely passive investments that throw off income without the children of the family doing anything at all. This is NOT the same as giving a child business experience working for the family trust in a legacy asset. In stock ownership this can be easily delineated, the family business that is closely held by the trust is clearly different from passive ownership in dividend producing stocks. Real estate can be more blurry, but for purposes of the model I strongly recommend, and as I will discuss in future posts, SEPARATING OUT the training, social, and the core financial flow, is a key part of a legacy family’s success.

Because of this many families focus entirely on the income stream from the dividend flow of a basket of trust-grade companies. On any serious time horizon, that yield plus steady dividend growth across recessions looks structurally similar to — and is in fact more diversified than — the rents and timber of the Churchills’ estate. A global dividend portfolio spreads productive-land risk across hundreds of the most durable cash-generating enterprises on earth. This is not a worse version of the Churchill income stream. It is an objectively better one.

The legal wrapper is the trust document, drafted by a competent trusts-and-estates attorney — a more flexible instrument than an act of Parliament.

Pledge the Income, Never the Corpus

The single most important operating principle of a dynasty trust is the one almost every modern family that sets one up gets wrong.

Most families use their “Dynasty Trust” to fund ventures from its own funds. The trust writes a check into the new restaurant. Co-invests in the cousin’s startup. Backs the brother-in-law’s real estate deal. Every time it does this the corpus is exposed. If the deal goes bad, the trust loses principal. Do it enough and the dynasty trust becomes a slow-motion distribution machine with extra paperwork. The corpus will be gone in a generation and the family will be back to square one, wondering where the money went.

The Churchill model is the exact opposite, and it is the one to copy. The Dukes of Marlborough did not sell Blenheim to fund the next venture. They could not. The entail forbade it. What they did was pledge the income from Blenheim — sometimes years, sometimes decades of it — as security for borrowing, and deploy the borrowed money into the venture. If the venture failed, the creditors took the income for the agreed term, the family ate beans for a while, and the underlying asset survived intact. When the term expired, the income came back and the loop could start again. The corpus was never at risk. Only the cash flow was.

Translated into modern terms: a properly drafted dynasty trust should allow each beneficiary to pledge their pro-rata share of the trust’s expected income for a defined period — say, up to twenty years — as collateral for borrowing in their own name, while the corpus of the trust itself is permanently insulated from those pledges. The beneficiary borrows. The bank takes a security interest in the future income stream. The corpus is untouchable. If the venture fails, the bank gets the income for the remaining term, the beneficiary lives on whatever else they have, and the trust itself is unimpaired. When the twenty years are up, the income flows back. The family recovers. The asset compounds. The lineage survives the bad decade.

This single rule — pledge the income, never the corpus — is the operational heart of Prestige Finance in modern trust law. It lets a family take real risk without taking lineage-ending risk. Build the trust to enforce this rule structurally, in the document itself, before any beneficiary is in a position to argue otherwise.

How Big Does the Trust Need to Be?

The practical question: how much capital does this take?

As a working rule, the structure starts functioning like a full income-producing core at around $10 million in dividend producing stocks (real estate tends to require a higher asset amount in my experience) if you are funding it from existing wealth. To be clear, funding a trust at a $10MM level will require a larger net worth to allow you to keep the assets you will need to fund your lifestyle. Below that, the administrative, legal, and trustee costs eat too much of the yield and the line of credit is too small to do useful prestige-finance work. Above it, the math gets interesting fast. If you do not have $10 million you can afford to place into trust right now, the most common on-ramp is a properly structured life insurance policy on the founders, sized so the death benefit alone capitalizes the trust.

Another interesting point is that properly managed portfolios (of either real estate or dividend stocks) can and should grow from good management. If you are particularly gifted at management of a key asset, consider creating a fund within the trust, and devoting your efforts to growing that bucket as much as possible before you pass on. This can be particularly true for long-term real estate development where the payoff after 10-15 years can almost function similarly to an insurance payout (but one that doesn’t require you to die).

A well-constructed dividend portfolio at the 10MM level throws off a meaningful cash yield — the modern analogue of a Churchill drawing £20,000 a year off the family seat. That income services the line of credit. The line of credit funds the prestige capital. The prestige capital generates the social activity. The social activity produces the private deals. The loop closes. And all of it can happen before the family ever acquires the physical seat that will, one day, be the training ground for the grandchildren.

A good financial advisor, even one with no explicit familiarity with any of this, usually knows when a client is ready for a passive investment structure of this type. Many advisors and CPAs have arrived at materially the right answer through a combination of tax-code diligence and 400 years of cultural osmosis.

A Brief Note on Aristocratic vs. Democratic Technologies

The Becoming Noble piece touched on this distinction. It is worth developing further, because it explains why the loop above is gaining relevance rather than losing it.

A democratic technology is any tool where a competent user and a master user produce essentially the same output. A firearm is the archetype: the same number of bullets come out no matter who pulls the trigger. Printing presses, power looms, assembly lines, and the 20th-century office job all belong here. Once you cross basic competence, the machine standardizes the result. There is no meaningful payoff for mastery beyond competence, which is why industrial societies pay competent workers reliably and have no natural place for the virtuoso.

An aristocratic technology is the opposite: the gap between competent and master is enormous, training takes years or decades, payoffs are delayed, and the apprentice does not produce enough value to pay for himself. Horsemanship was an aristocratic technology. Pre-press scribal copying was an aristocratic technology. Weaving, metalwork, masonry, and all the great crafts were fundamentally aristocratic technologies. So, today, are fiat currency management, nuclear power, chip development and fabrication, mass media, and — the big one — AI. Aristocratic technologies have minimal rewards for mere competence and heavily reward character, judgment, and fully developed mastery. They do not fit inside a democratic institution, and they do not produce reliable outputs under democratic management.

How Do You Build a Great House? You Need an Aristocratic Technology.

As I have been saying on this substack since the beginning: you cannot build a great house on top of a democratic technology. You can get rich on one. You can have a good career on one. You can raise competent children on one. But you cannot build the kind of multi-generational structure — the kind of family that owns its own property, keeps its own children, and serves its community across centuries — on a technology where mere competence is rewarded and true mastery does not pay. Great houses exist because they are the optimal social form for producing low-time-preference, high-character, high-trust people who can run aristocratic technologies. Take away either the technology or the structure and society collapses into short-term, rent-seeking behavior within a few generations.

Every enduring lineage has some central technology at its core. The knights had horsemanship and the bladed arts. The monastic scholarship lineages had the faithful copying of ancient texts. The master guilds had the high end of their craft. A family without such a technology can accumulate wealth in one generation and lose it in the next. A family with one can fumble for decades and still come back, because the underlying capability is still there.

So the first question for any would-be founder is not what business should I start or what school should I send my children to. It is: what aristocratic technology will sit at the core of our house? For most founders today, the answer is Prestige Finance itself — layered on top of whatever underlying craft (operating, investing, building, governing) you already have. The dynasty trust is where that answer becomes a structure.

The Pattern, In Five Steps

This is the loop, in its most universal form, that every aristocratic technology in history has rewarded. The substrate changes — knights, financiers, whatever AI-era operators come next — but the steps do not. They are the same five things the great houses of three centuries ago ran, the same five things the most durable institutions of today run, and the same five things you will run if you intend to found a house that lasts.

1. Start with a skill in an aristocratic technology. Pick a domain where mastery actually pays, where training takes a decade, where character and judgment compound into outcomes no machine can standardize. For most founders today that means Prestige Finance layered on top of whatever underlying craft — operating, investing, building, governing — you already have.

2. Generate personal prestige by demonstration. Not by claiming it. Not by branding it. By doing the work in public, on real stakes, in a way the people whose opinion matters can verify. Prestige comes from a visible, costly, irreversible demonstration that this is the kind of person one wants in the room.

3. Curate key social bonds with other virtuous players. Not a network. Not a following. A small, deliberately built circle whose character you trust, whose judgment you respect, and whose long-term interests are aligned with yours. Host them. Travel to them. Lend to them. Marry into them. Be the convener, not the attendee. The room you build is more valuable than any single deal inside it, because the room will be there for the next deal too.

4. Pursue tactical wins that build, and do not compromise, the brand. Not every opportunity is worth taking. The discipline is to ask, every time, does this win compound the family name, or does it spend it? Take the ones that compound. Walk away from the ones that spend. Across decades, this single discipline is the difference between a great house and a one-generation success story.

5. Give your sons and daughters the spiritual and economic foundation to do the same. The whole point of running the loop is to hand the next generation a working machine — relationships with family, professionals, and community they have seen modeled well, so the flywheel keeps turning after you are no longer turning it. A great house is a covenant across generations. Step five is the covenant.

The Challenge

What I am describing is not a get-rich scheme. It is a posture toward capital, toward relationships, toward your own name, and toward time. It assumes you are building something that has to be legible to someone who is not yet born. It assumes the real room is more valuable than the digital one. It assumes that the thing you buy today — the trust, the portfolio, the restored building, the library, the cellar, the horse — is being bought as infrastructure for a convening function that will run for the next fifty years.

We are at a peculiar moment. The aristocratic technologies are coming back, the online attention economy is eating itself, the institutions that trained the managerial class are collapsing, and the rooms where things actually get decided are getting smaller and more exclusive. The subsidies that used to produce aristocratic operators have been withdrawn, but the economy itself is now rewarding the skills those subsidies used to train. You can step into this shift as a spectator, or you can step into it as a founder — quietly, deliberately building the income-producing core of a great house today, and the family seat that will house it tomorrow.

The great houses of the past did not know what was coming either. What they knew was how to host, how to lend, how to borrow, how to keep the core asset safe, and how to exercise restraint in the obligations they attached their name to in a way that made it worth something. Three hundred years later we are still using one of their names as shorthand for the 20th century. If you are the founder or the scion of a house that intends to still be here in 2326, you can and must master the well-established aristocratic technologies, like Prestige Finance, and the emerging aristocratic technologies reshaping the world all around us. There is a lot of uncertainty, and deep fear of a permanent underclass, where you spend the rest of your life going to someone else’s table, on someone else’s terms, hoping the host remembers your name when the allocations get made. But if you have the vision, the virtue, and the ambition to build a great house, there has not been a better time in four centuries.

What the Engine Is Actually For

The income-producing core described above is the foundation, but only the foundation. Return for a moment to the question we set aside at the top: what was the family seat actually for?

The income function was the surface answer. Those with slightly more insight note that it was a training tool — the environment in which a Churchill learned to be a Churchill. Where a boy watched his father host, watched gardens get commissioned, watched syndicates negotiated on the terrace, watched a guest bring information that became an allocation that became a dinner that became a marriage. The family seat, and the townhouse in London that served the same function, was where the next generation learned the pattern by watching it run.

But the seat was also the first prestige asset. It was a physical demonstration of the family’s generational skill in managing complex financial obligations across time. Visitors felt attraction, envy, even awe. Even family members who did not live there could leverage the reputation of a building that communicated what its members were too polite to ever say. Winston Churchill, though he never lived at Blenheim, used the prestige of his family seat to secure the most advantageous deal of his life: his marriage.

Recognizing this three-fold purpose — income, training, and prestige — reframes the modern problem. The primary difference between successful legacy families and the shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves crowd is the willingness to work together to preserve and use a core prestige asset. Most families put “a beautiful house the family could entertain at” far below “each child getting the largest house they can afford in the suburbs.”

There is a hierarchical status game embedded in this. When the family as a whole has access to a core asset, someone is going to control that access, some will pay for it, some will use it, and those will not always be the same people at the same time. You cannot make family members equal. Some will contribute more. Some will rank higher. You must make peace with that if you want your family to thrive in the aristocratic, perhaps neo-feudal, world we are entering.

Which is why character matters. The story your family tells itself, the way it trains its children, the character it demonstrates in public — this is the test. By demonstrating that you can manage your household well, you show yourself worthy of assignments in the broader world of finance and government, which are perpetually short of people for high-character, high-trust, low-time-preference roles.

The Gentry had a unique situation where their core asset provided ALL THREE functions, and that is likely not replicable today. But as we have discussed there is a clear modern alternative to the protected income producing function, the engine. But an engine alone is not enough, likely by itself it creates trust fund babies. So how do you give your children access to a prestige asset, and how does a family govern that access together without fracturing the thing it is trying to build?

We will get into that in the next post.

One of the core statements of liberalism (the 6th Statement in case anyone is interested) according to James Burnham’s Suicide of the West is “A popular revolt against tyranny or dictatorship is right and deserves approval.” Whenever someone points out the categorical insanity of the NeoCons most recent decision to bomb a country into oblivion based on this tired trope, the examples of tyranny that get trotted out in support are inevitably drawn from the behavior of the French aristocracy in the last 10 minutes before the French Revolution. A more sophisticated interlocutor might cite the more recent and relevant example in the bad behavior of the Spanish Nobility in the run-up to the Spanish civil war. But in either case, they present the same image, a decadent, privileged, nobility, unwilling to work, and useless on the modern battlefield, who use their wealth and power, inherited without effort from prior generations.

But this begs the question that I ended the last article with: How does a class of nobility, which was insanely dominant for almost a thousand years and produced unrelenting success over and over again, become so weak and ridiculous in such a short time? How do you go from El Cid to Don Quixote? From leading thousands of men and inspiring all of Europe, to being a figure of ridicule tilting at windmills? The answer cannot simply be moral decay; something more structural must have shifted beneath them.

I believe the answer lies in the death of Chivalry, which I would argue is at LEAST as relevant as the “Death of God” and likely moreso. To be clear the ACTUAL death of God would be wildly more important than the death of Chivalry but as the enemies of Christ seem to forget with hilarious regularity, rumors of the death of the Crucified God are ALWAYS overstated. He (and his Church) just keep coming back. Chivalry however, IS truly dead, and I maintain that it is NOT EVER coming back.

So when I say Chivalry is not coming back.. what precisely to do I mean?

As the meme goes… we are not the same.

What chivalry IS is the depersonalized form of the French noun chevalier, which is to say a Cavalryman, which is to say a HORSEMAN. For those of you who are grammatical nerds, Grok tells me that the French -erie suffix involves shifting from the Subject of the Horseman, to the Object of Horsemanship. So chivalry IS in its essence, the set of qualities that made you excellent at the business of efficiently killing other men from the back of the horse.

There is a great paradox here, in that the first qualification for the utter brutality of medieval combat is to build a relationship of trust (often quite an emotional relationship) with a skittish, violent, powerful horse.

There is a scene that you have likely seen in various horse-related movies, it is the story of a boy becoming a man. At some point, the man has been stripped of everything, his name, his identity, (sometimes his clothes). And a horse, a WILD horse, enters the scene. Then the music swells and the man slowly, slowly (so as not to startle the filly) walks up, places his hand on the horse’s cheek, blows into her nostrils, and slowly slowly looks her in the eyes. And of course, the horse dips her head and blows her breath back to him, and all of a sudden he is able to leap upon her back and they ride off into the sunset.

I have actually seen an experienced horse trainer go through “the moment” with a horse. Of course with most horses, and most people, and in most times there is a great deal more preparation and lead-up to “the moment” at which a horse decides that there is a man worth riding her. But having been witness to those moments, there is a kernel of truth to the movie portrayal, in that it is much more like a switch flipping, a moment of magic, pure and beautiful in which the internal character of the man taming the horse is particularly evident. That is of course the highest example of a whole range of skills in which a man proves himself worthy to ride an already trained horse, which is particularly important when the horse is a destrier, trained to fight and kill almost as efficiently as his master.

In the 5th century BC Herodotus tells us the Persian way of raising men: “Teach him the horse, and the bow, and teach him to despise all lies.” From the moment that Herodotus writes that line and for the next 2000 years (from say 500 BC until 1500 AD), the horsemanship, the Chivalry of a man, and his nation was a critical indicator of their ability to be successful in battle. Cavalrymen are distinguished from infantrymen by many things but perhaps most significant is that infantry might be skilled in defense, but were notoriously bad at pursuit. Cavalrymen were the dominant piece of a victorious army’s ability to continue in pursuit of a defeated enemy, which is what allowed a victory to turn into loot, properties, and the acclaim of their countrymen and countrywomen.

As I said last week, what people miss is that originally chivalry was not a social affectation or even a leadership training mechanism, but an actual path to wealth and power.

Now this leads to an interesting question, riffing on the domain mastery concept I articulated some weeks back. If Chivalry is (or was originally) the mastery of the skillset of a cavalryman, the paradox of taming a horse then the next question is what are “similar” domains that the master Cavalryman can easily adapt to with a “high efficiency ratio.” And what you find is a VAST amount of western linguistic metaphors making comparisons between women and horses. From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, all the way down to the constant quest in the Manosphere to find a “Ride or Die Woman.”

The Ride or Die woman comes to us most directly from the motorcycle culture (whose enduring strength I believe draws from its ability to give new life to a culture optimized for the horse). But before it was a motorcycle culture reference it was a horseman reference.

Allow me to set the scene: you have a medieval battlefield and local women have gathered to cheer on the victors. The Leader of the victors, covered in blood (mostly others), and sweat, rides over to the crowd of peasants, and he slows his horse. Various women meet his eyes, and in classic female fashion look away and then look back. He selects one and he and his horse walk toward her slowly, slowly so as not to spook the (human) filly in front of him. And then all at once she reaches up and he reaches out and swings her on the back of his saddle, and rides off with her into the sunset. They likely do not know each other’s names and she may not even speak his language… but such relationships were romanticized across Europe for most of the medieval period and the legend continues today.

From a domain mastery perspective, modern science tells us about the hormone Oxytocin, which at least in mammals, is associated with concepts like trust and honor. If you are unsure, in the slightest degree about the truth of your words, and your ability to keep the promise, explicit or implied, your body WILL not produce oxytocin or not very much of it. As far as we can tell (and modern science’s ability to understand pheromones is painfully limited), men, women, horses, and likely all mammals close enough to catch your scent will KNOW down in their bones whether your words line up with your scent, whether you are worthy for them to take the intimate, vulnerable step of “pledging their troth” and placing their lives and futures in your hand.

It is the paradox of war that in order to be a good leader, you must LOVE your men, and in order to be a good leader you must take your men whom you love into battle to fight and die, often on behalf of a higher noble whose love for you is what qualifies him to send you into battle to fight and perhaps to die.

So in this context, Chivalry was a skillset that involved building trust with a VERY powerful animal, which granted you a literally superhuman level of strength to direct on the field of battle. The domain mastery of that field ALSO proved very “near” to other domains such as inspiring love and loyalty from women, that men found useful and fulfilling in their lives.

So moving beyond mere Chivalry, I would frame the archetype of medieval European nobility as the overlap of 6 “technologies” or domains that an aristocrat or noble was expected to be master of. Three domains involved animal husbandry (again note the overlap between domains implied in that phrase), specifically the Horse, Hound, and Hawk. The other three domains were weapons technologies, specifically the Sword, Bow, and (mounted) Lance. While time does not permit me to go through each of these domains and list out the specific personality traits and the “related” or “nearby” domains, I assure you that various combinations of these specific technologies function almost as a fingerprint. Throughout European history as there were subtle shifts in the technology used by different groups, it produced QUITE a diversity of flavors of “Aristocracy.” For example, you would NEVER confuse an Italian or Spanish aristocrat with a German or an English noble.

But there were some commonalities produced among other things, a high value on not working with your hands, on cultivating a “gentlemanly mindset” on things that were largely incompatible with the new firearm technology (though the Musketeers tried quite hard). What would later become known as the “Protestant work ethic” is likely a result of the personality traits that made men more likely to survive the conflicts using early firearms, most notably the 30 years war.

Earlier I mentioned Don Quixote, the ridiculous figure tilting at windmills. In college I had a macro-economics professor who was OBSESSED with Don Quixote. He claimed that all of the problems that Don Quixote was trying to solve were the result of the cheap mechanical labor introduced by the industrial revolution. This cheap mechanical labor was crashing the old peasant labor markets, the children of the peasants were leaving to find better jobs, and many nobles were faced with the ignominious choice of suing the peasants into leaving their serfdom or going bankrupt under the strain of feeding so many mouths whose labor no longer paid for their keep. The main vector by which this industrialization was entering the countryside were these new Windmills, whose mechanical power could be applied to an almost ENDLESS number of jobs that used to require abundant peasant labor. And so as my professor was fond of saying, from a macro-economics perspective… the Windmills REALLY WERE Giants eating the peasants’ children.

Now imagine that you are a hereditary noble, an expert in the 6 domains I mentioned above. You might be very very smart, maybe smart enough to intuit on some level that the presence of the Windmills is causing problems that place your ancient vows in peril of being broken. But the distance between the macro-economics problem that you face and the domains in which you are a DEMONSTRATED master: horse, hound, hawk, sword, bow and lance, is IMMENSE. What analogy can you find between the tools that you can bring to bear, and the problem which you utterly lack the vocabulary to describe? Seen in that light, perhaps calling the windmills giants is not so bad. But whether it is bad or not, IT IS THE ANALOGY THAT CHIVALRY DEMANDS. A world in which that analogy does not work, is a world in which… Chivalry is dead, and we have killed it. Which is of course exactly where we are.

The New Aristocracy

Returning to the theme of Domain Mastery, it is important to understand that optimization for a particular thing is not neutral vis-a-vis psychological profiles or genetic types. There is in particular a key barrier to domain mastery that involves the ability to “do the rep.” If the rep is holding a lance and riding on a horse in a joust, then only an exceptionally fit and physically skilled individual can even DO the rep. If the rep requires multiplying four digit numbers in your head as a prerequisite for some more abstract mathematical skill, most of us will never be able to get there.

If an absolute requirement for being successful when being born into a family of a certain class is being able to lift the lance, then not too many generations down, you have eliminated virtually all of those who lacked the necessary capacity.

As I hope to discuss in more depth in my next article, for the past 400 years, there has not been anything like that kind of selection pressure for the bulk of society, at least not in any objective sense. There have certainly been domains (particularly banking, law, certain types of mass media) that maintained a kind of skill-based aristocracy, but nothing with the kind of eugenic power the of the constant cavalry-based contests that marked every European generation between Charlemagne and Cromwell. In the main, aristocracy became a thing that was inherited, or could be bought if one accumulated sufficient wealth in a domain totally removed from the Sword, Bow, and Lance and as I discussed last week the Battle-Ax.

We are unfamiliar with the idea of a functional aristocracy, an aristocracy who are all experts in a core technology or set of technologies, and who can evaluate each other in skill-based duels using those technologies or depend on each other in a war in which they are the measure, the champions of their nations. In an important sense, for the past 400 years, since the invention of the firearm in some ways there has not been any true aristocrats, no true knights who won their spurs in battle. All of our elites have been some variation of plutocrats or inherited oligarchs. Wealth begets wealth in a system that rarely, if ever, makes contact with reality.

But I am writing this because perhaps a new aristocracy is rising. Perhaps people achieving domain mastery in complex, skill-based fields like Software Engineering, Cryptography and of course overshadowing all the rest AI. Perhaps the title of Technoking will become more than a joke made in a public filing.

I am quite serious about this. I think it is entirely possible that in 50 years time, battles will be conducted by drones and counter drones, rockets and counter rockets, managed at inhuman speeds by bespoke AI servants. It is possible, and even seems likely (given the preeminent success of Palantir) that specific partnerships between particular men and specially trained AI will rise to prominence. Perhaps we will even be able to test such men by pitting their AI creations against one another in digital tournament of some kind, and evaluate the character the virtu of the man by the AI that he trained and managed, as our ancestors once evaluated a knight’s character by his horse and hawk.

However, we must be careful not to stretch the metaphor too much. The qualities and persona of a man who grows up taming horses and training his hands to draw a bow, is going to be quite different from the man who builds machines from a young age, or has a gift with the deep and abstract programming languages that are now arising in the AI space. The fear of a vampiric horse culture, of aristocrats aping a tradition that made sense when the state of the art transportation technology was a four legged animal being granted undeserved political power once more will not arise.

We will in time find new metaphors to understand the men that are coming to the fore. But Chivalry is dead… and we have clung to its cut off blooms for far too long, they have withered, molded, and finally rotted away. And perhaps that was in the providence of God, that the new aristocrats that may emerge from this burgeoning technology shift will in the large part be truly independent of the old.

As we think about what this technology shift could look like it is useful to think about what the LAST technology shift looked like. I want to illustrated this by thinking about three broad classes of people. In the medieval system you had the martial class with its core skills of chivalry moving from squire to knight, the intellectual class with the development of scribes and scholars, and the artisan class with apprentices and master craftsmen, such as weavers and smiths. Then in a very short time frame, sociologically speaking, knights were replaced by units of infantry man armed with firearms, scribes were replaced with printing presses, and weavers were replaced with textile mills. I would argue that it is THAT technological shift, and the social and economic consequences that flowed from it that created the modern world, and modern liberal democracies.

But we will talk more about that in the next post.

While I am not a full-blown technological determinist, it is undeniable that societies respond to technologies, especially technologies that are dominant over a long period of time. The longer that a technology is dominant the more that people can incorporate that technology into their planning, and build friendships, business entities, and even larger structures around it. As we discussed last week under the concept of domain mastery, people have an incredible ability to optimize for what they practice. This is true of groups as well as individuals. Just look at the improvement in small group urban warfare tactics enabled by games like Call of Duty, paintball, and airsoft.

Over time the entirety of a culture can grow to have an expectation that A, B, and C technologies will be dominant for the foreseeable future. This leads to an assumption that X, Y, and Z skills, and especially those skills in relationship with other people with compatible skills themselves, will be a “good career trajectory.” At some point the actual analysis of the technology ceases to happen, it is a fixed point, assumed. And this is okay, because the technology is SO dominant that it continues the techniques skill have a functional reality… until one day it doesn’t, and then so the story goes “everything changes.”

Except, in real life, everything does NOT change all at once. One of the terrifying realities of human culture is the concept of social inertia. Persons, lineages, and entities with wealth and power tend to retain wealth and power even after the original method by which they acquired that wealth and power has become technologically irrelevant or even outright illegal. This is the great weakness of most formulations of technological determinism, in that they assume an efficiency in the flows of information and human behavior that is simply not borne out by history.

A helpful way to think about this is to distinguish between a formal definition and a functional definition.

A formal definition tells you what a thing is called in law, custom, title, or social memory. A functional definition tells you what that thing actually does in the world, what realities it is equipped to govern, what powers it can reliably exercise, and what tasks justify its place in the social order. A thing may survive for centuries in the formal sense after it has already died in the functional sense. This distinction is essential if we are to speak intelligently about Aristocracy.

This problem is made worse by the corruption of words. Once a word ceases to describe a concrete and publicly recognizable reality, and instead becomes merely a term of praise or blame, coherent discussion becomes nearly impossible. People imagine they are debating facts when in reality they are only exchanging moral gestures. Before going further, it is worth perusing a quote from C. S. Lewis, which is one of clearest explanations of this process, that I am aware of:

“The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone ‘a gentleman’ you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not ‘a gentleman’ you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A.

But then there came people who said—so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully—‘Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?’

They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man ‘a gentleman’ in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is ‘a gentleman’ becomes simply a way of insulting him.

When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object. (A ‘nice’ meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.”

-CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

This is why modern arguments about Aristocracy so often go nowhere. Though Lewis uses the term Gentleman instead of Aristocrat, I believe he is discussing the exact same historical progression. One side imagines hereditary parasites in lace and powdered wigs. The other imagines noble virtues like courage, honor, and stewardship. But neither image is yet precise enough. Both are mixing up formal remnants, moral aspirations, and functional realities. The question is not first whether aristocrats were admirable or contemptible. The question is: what did they do that gave them the power and wealth to be a real governing class in the first place?

I must insert here an obligatory quote from

When I say that Aristocracy was once real, I do not mean merely that there were titled persons, heraldic privileges, and inherited estates. I mean that there once existed a class whose domain mastery in certain technologies that were dominant for centuries gave them a genuine civilizational function. If that function disappears, the legal shell may remain for generations, but the thing itself is already mostly dead. The problem is not just with the difference between the millionaire who has bought his peerage with wealth acquired in a manner TOTALLY unrelated to the arts of war that once defined the rights and privileges of aristocracy.

The larger problem is the gap, the often insurmountable abyss between the ancestor who won his position with the battle-ax and his descendant speaking on the floor of the House of Lords. The point is made even more poignant if we assume that the descendant has (under the requirements of his family no doubt) mastered the arts of wielding a battle-ax. But his mastery of that weapon means something TOTALLY different than when his ancestor acquired the same skill. Namely that for the ancestor the battle-ax was a state of the art weapons system, and for the descendant it is a vestigial skill with no military value to the nation in whose highest house he serves. To be clear, there was a time in which high-level personal skill in one of the weapons of the day could win you honors and titles on the ever-present field of battle. That battlefield was the ultimate reality check, the “natural meritocracy of extreme violence” on which all later forms of aristocratic privilege rested. It was certainly more real than the “artificial meritocracy of the spreadsheet” currently strangling the modern world to death.

Speaking of artificial meritocracies, in a deeply troubling way, the plutocrat who buys his title with money, and the speaker who inherited his oligarchical position are much more similar to each other than either is to the original lords who won their nobility on the medieval battlefield. This is the underlying truth that gives the sting to the leftist claim that aristocracy, plutocracy, and oligarchy are the same. But this is because for both of them, their security is provided by modern infantryman in an increasingly industrialized military. It is not the battle-ax but the bayonet that provides the safety in which they either managed their inherited wealth (and increasingly precarious position) or generate the sums to buy their way into an increasingly less rational status game.

As D. Elton Trueblood noted (and Os Guinness popularized) “cut flowers culture” is where a cultural idea or practice is cut away from the cultural roots or necessities that gave it power, meaning, and ultimately life. As with a flower, the beauty does not immediately fade, even though the plant is surely already dead. Barring some kind of planting in the original soil. When this happens with a technology, especially a technology whose practitioners are wealthy and powerful they frequently keep using the technology for secondary purposes. For most of these technologies, because mastery was useful in some functional domain, demonstrations of that mastery (or of skills that led to that mastery) were part of a cultural status game, or to put it more politely they were part of the “leadership pathway.”

Unfortunately, even when there is an underlying functional skill it is quite difficult to keep “metrics from becoming targets.” This is why you want frequent, repeated, (ideally low-impact) contact with reality, or at least with a feed-back loop that you do not control.

But status games in a purely formalistic domain can begin to behave very much like speculative bubbles in a market. Once the underlying functional reality is no longer disciplining the participants, status begins to be priced by status, prestige by prestige, signal by signal. Men begin competing not in the thing itself, but in the socially recognized markers that once pointed to competence in the thing. And because those markers are being evaluated by other players trapped in the same game, the process can spiral upward into absurdity for quite a long time. Just as in a financial bubble, the internal logic can appear self-validating right up until the moment that some harder reality intrudes and reveals that the entire structure has been floating on reflexive social valuation rather than substance.

So we might think of there being five stages of a dominant technology:

1. The initial period where that technology is new and exciting and is actively being analyzed and interpreted by both its adherents and detractors. It is not well understood.

2. The technology achieves functional dominance, and over time (especially if it remains dominant) it is incorporated into more and more social structures: educational, business, and (if it remains dominant for centuries) political, and even civilizational.

3. The technology is displaced as dominant in some or all of its core domains, but continues to be relevant (as a status symbol if nothing else) because its practitioners still have wealth and power, at least for now.

4. Bereft of its functional roots, the technology is altered, metrics become targets, and its practice devolves into a pure status game, at which point the cut flowers can frequently start to smell very bad indeed.

5. Finally (after the bubble pops) the technology lapses into a historical curiosity, practiced, if at all, by those academics whose sole purpose is to preserve otherwise irrelevant.

If this framework is basically correct, then several implications follow, and they deserve to be treated carefully rather than rushed past. In particular, when I talk about Neo-feudalism or the return of an aristocratic structure, I DO NOT MEAN, nor I think does any serious student of history mean that we will return to the technological habits of the medieval culture, or that the battle-ax will suddenly become a state of the art military technology once again.

To return to the topic of aristocracy as I have tried to parse out the break-down in these conversations (with friends and allies I should note), I have come to realize that in the European mind Aristocracy is seen in the same way that Americans are taught to see chattel slavery: as their culture’s original sin. Regardless of the actual evils of US slavery, and the much lesser evils of European Aristocrats, these are both intolerable to the leftist mind, because they are hierarchies, which is (to the leftist) the true original sin. It should be noted that strawmanning all European aristocracy as decadent, status chasing, unwilling to work, privileged “gentleman” is particularly helpful if you’re a communist agitator looking for a government to overthrow. But this again conflates the functional meritocratic aristocracy of the medieval period,

While I might note that the worthwhile aristocrats were almost entirely purged in the trenches of World War I, there is an enduring question here. How does a class of nobility, which was insanely dominant for almost a thousand years and produced unrelenting success over and over again, become so weak and ridiculous in such a short time? How do you go from El Cid to Don Quixote? From leading thousands of men and inspiring all of Europe, to being a figure of ridicule tilting at windmills? The answer cannot simply be moral decay; something more structural must have shifted beneath them.

I believe the answer lies in the death of Chivalry, which I would argue is at least as relevant as the “Death of God” and likely moreso. More precisely, it lies in the collapse of the technological system that made chivalry a source of real power.

To be clear the death of God would be wildly more important than the death of Chivalry but as the enemies of Christ seem to forget with hilarious regularity, rumors of the death of the Crucified God are always overstated. He (and his Church) just keep coming back. Chivalry however, is truly dead, and it is never coming back. The conditions that sustained chivalry were materially dependent on a specific form of warfare that no longer exists. But we will talk more about that, and what Chivalry actually is, in the next post.

This post may not seem to immediately apply to the topic of building a Great House, but stay with me. I have been having a series of conversations about AI, aristocracy and why everyone is thinking about multi-generational structures, but before I can share with you I need to establish some definitions and distinguish what I find to be unhelpful confusion in some of the words that everyone is using. The first such word is Agency.

If you spend any time observing the culture of Silicon Valley or the modern corporate elite, you will inevitably encounter this modern “everything” word.

Now I want to preface this discussion by saying that there are INCREDIBLY useful and helpful discussions of agency, for example in this recent article by Johann Kurtz or in the book that Noah Revoy wrote some years back. These are helpful and positive framings of the word agency, and I am not taking issue with them.

What I am taking issue with is the assumption that the limiting factor (and therefore the thing that needs to be addressed) is ALWAYS agency or the lack thereof. It is important to understand that by the very nature of things there can be different limiting factors in a given situation.

Limiting Factors

The concept of a limiting factor in growth or processes refers to the idea that progress is constrained by the scarcest or most restrictive resource, preventing further advancement until that bottleneck is addressed, much like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This principle, often associated with Liebig’s law of the minimum, applies across various domains, from ecology to manufacturing, where the availability of essential components dictates the overall output. For instance, in the Solvay process, an industrial chemical method used to produce sodium carbonate (soda ash), key ingredients include sodium chloride (brine), ammonia, carbon dioxide, and water, along with limestone for calcium carbonate regeneration. If you have an abundance of brine, ammonia, and water but only a limited supply of carbon dioxide, the reaction sequence (which involves forming ammonium bicarbonate and then sodium bicarbonate) will halt once the carbon dioxide is depleted, limiting the yield of sodium carbonate regardless of the surplus in other reactants. However, once you resolve the scarcity of carbon dioxide by sourcing more, another ingredient, such as ammonia, which is recycled but can degrade over time, may emerge as the new limiting factor, requiring DIFFERENT SOLUTION to sustain or scale the process.

The same thing is true in management. In human resources and talent management, for example, a company might have strong recruiting pipelines that attract plenty of candidates, ample budget for competitive salaries, solid onboarding processes, comprehensive training programs, effective quality control in performance reviews, and even decent benefits packages. However, if poor management practices; such as weak leadership, micromanaging, or lack of empathy from direct supervisors; persist, employee retention will suffer dramatically, with high turnover rates draining resources and halting overall progress regardless of how well other areas perform. Once leadership quality improves through targeted manager training, better feedback systems, or cultural shifts, the limiting factor often shifts to something else, like insufficient career development opportunities or unclear advancement paths, which then caps engagement and long-term growth. Or consider quality control in a manufacturing firm: abundant skilled workers, modern equipment, and rigorous training might exist, but if raw material supply chains are unreliable and cause frequent shortages of a key component, production output stalls, quality suffers from rushed workarounds, and retention drops as employees grow frustrated with constant disruptions, until supply chain reliability is fixed, at which point another constraint, perhaps inadequate process documentation or skill gaps in newer hires, becomes the new limiter that must be addressed to sustain improvements.

My observation is that Agency is critical at solving human scaled problems, and is therefore necessary to every human. We might even say that Agency is another way of saying “the domain mastery of being human.” But not all of our problems are human scale, and this continues to increase. There are numerous intractable problems that agency not backed by actual skill in a domain (which often requires humility) cannot and will not solve.

The Modern Frame - Agency is All you Need.

As comedian Brian Regan once noted, “Catholics see Mary everywhere, Protestants see Satan everywhere.” Well, modern tech bros see agency, or more properly, the lack of agency, everywhere. But if you pause and ask them to actually define what this magical aura of “agency” is, you inevitably get a list of qualities that are remarkably specific to the success conditions of a 21st-century software developer living in California.

In a recent discussion with RosebudKane, he offered a brilliant insight: “the tech elite produced this term [agency] because they desperately want to believe that their specific skillset is universal. They like to imagine that their “agency” would have made them just as successful as a Yakuza member in 1962, a courtier at Versailles, or a General in the Roman Army.”

This is, of course, patently absurd.

I could multiply examples of the “software engineer enters new domain and struggles” trope, but suffice it to say that even when the MOST successful tech elites, men like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, attempt to enter the alien environment of geopolitics, they often struggle deeply. When faced with domains where their core skills are devalued or contradicted by reality, they find it distasteful and quickly withdraw back to the narrow domains where they can safely exert their famous “agency”. They do this even when it is more expensive to retreat than to simply step outside their self-imposed limits.

To understand why this happens, and how we can actually build the kind of competence necessary to sustain a Great House, I want to suggest a more profitable frame than universal “agency.”

We need to talk about Domain Mastery.

The Magic of Automaticity

Domain mastery is the ability to grow in a task to the point where a novice could not replicate your output no matter how long they were given to do so. It relies on a cognitive science concept called automaticity. Automaticity refers to the ability to perform a skill rapidly, accurately, and without conscious attention. By engaging in long hours of deliberate, focused practice, (Malcolm Gladwell popularized a study that picked 10,000 hours as the headline) humans can literally offload skills from their limited short-term working memory to highly efficient, unconscious processes in their long-term memory.

Once you have properly encoded these skills through meaningful practice, your brain architecture becomes optimized for that specific task. You can respond to tiny details instantly, often faster than a calm, deliberative process would ever allow. This automatized foundation frees up your cognitive resources to perform complex, layered “meta” tasks. There are different levels of “meta-tasks” for instance in driving, there is the point at which the actual motions of driving the car become automatic (turning the steering wheel, pressing the gas, brake and other pedals). Then there is the point at which certain operations become automatic, passing a car, going through an freeway interchange. At a certain point entire routes can become automatized leaving the mental bandwidth for the person driving to focus on other things (like podcasts).

What we mean by “mastery” or “geniuses” or “experts” is probably at least two levels of meta-tasking, at which point the master can do things that a novice cannot replicate NO MATTER HOW LONG HE WAS GIVEN TO COMPLETE THE TASK. This is the case in domains like the piano where pressing the keys, then mastering sight-reading require two levels of automatization and only THEN can the pianist focus on affecting the emotions of the audience by subtle variations in his playing that someone with such experience simply could not duplicate. Another example is sharpshooting, which is to say long-range firearms. There are a number of factors about the rifle that you have to master beyond the point of thinking about them before you can learn to shoot at long-range, even with modern tools.

The main point to understand here is when you practice EVERYTHING WE CAN MEASURE both in terms of your body and your brain optimizes for performing that particular task. Then at a certain point, automaticity takes over. One of the interesting things to understand about the studies that Gladwell was reviewing is that almost everything in life comes down to being able to practice discrete skills. Some domains might only take 1,000 hours, and others might take 30,000. There does not appear to be much in the way of talent that affects the actual attainment of mastery.

There are two preconditions to practice. The first is simply time, which is to say the ability to devote yourself to a particular craft without material considerations preventing you from doing so, access to the tools of the trade (which may or may not be common or cheap). The second is harder, which is to say a mindset of genuinely wanting to improve. Too much fear or desire likely affects the ability of a person to get into the right mindset. You have to be interested in improving and in many ways you have to love the subject. Interestingly, you will notice that both of these factors are at a minimum heavily affected by the socio-economic status of the practitioner (more on that in a future article).

The Status Shock of Being a Beginner

Likely, one of the biggest reasons why children learn more effectively is that adults lack the second condition, the right mindset due to the frequent presence of a strong emotion which is pride (the wounded kind).

As anyone who has tried to teach a second language to adults can tell you, the hardest thing about it is the constant shock of the status imbalance. You have to go from being a fluent, acknowledged expert in your own language to sounding like a babbling child or an idiot. Most humans, especially highly successful ones, will do absolutely anything to escape this painful loss in social status.

One of the most interesting things in modern cognitive science is that it is actually quite difficult to parse the difference between neuro-plasticity and the humility that is necessary to learn effectively. That is to say that it could be the case, that “faith like a child” is the primary qualification to learn at any age, or at least that the genuine age-related differences are so subtle that current science cannot distinguish the two.

This is likely what “talent” or “genius” is, some kind of early formative experience of a positive nature with the underlying skill or technology that leaves an imprint on the person that says, “I can do this, I am good at this, I am HAPPY and INTERESTED in this.” That mindset will allow someone to keep on practicing effectively until their body and brain really DOES optimize sufficiently to allow them to do something that others cannot do.

What this means is that differences in personality and interest (some subtle and some not so subtle) matter GREATLY in terms of who achieves mastery in a given domain. The demands of strong practice reward those who enjoy the process. When we recognize that some domains reward the peak performers (famously youtube), some domains reward general competence (famously plumbers), and some domains are actively disincentivized by the economic system (such as family formation and parenting) this means that the character and personality quirks of the people that are “successful” in a given technology stack are relatively predictable, with the following caveat.

Near Domains vs. Distant Domains

One of the real things that I believe is responsible for the universal agency myth, is that if you have a high amount of skill in one area, and you approach another area it is FREQUENTLY BUT NOT ALWAYS the case that your skills in one domain transfer to another.

However, this transfer of skills is only efficient if the new domain is “near” or closely related to your original domain. For example, if you have mastered one Romance language, learning Latin or French becomes much easier because the domains are “near” in that they have an actual overlap in the skills certain words, the grammatical structures, the underlying phonemes.

Beyond domains where the actual technical skills transfer are domains where the skills appear to be related as a result of the mental frameworks involved. For example, several warriors from Asian cultures recorded a great deal of overlap between the mastery of the strokes of calligraphy and the strokes of swordplay. The Western world meanwhile is replete with comparisons between the skill of a general (particularly of infantry for some reason) and forging steel. The physical skills in these cases are almost totally different from each other and yet the insistence on an overlap of mental framework is widespread among practitioners.

It is possible that this metaphorical overlap is simply a confidence mechanism, like talent, giving the practitioner of a new and different skill an optimistic and enjoyable mindset of the practice of a different skill. The metaphor allows someone who does not naturally enjoy the process of practice in a given domain to trick his brain into doing the hard work.

But if you will permit me I will present a DIFFERENT theory.

The Elephant and His Rider

Most of you will be familiar with the concept of the “elephant and its rider” metaphor, popularized by Jonathan Haidt and supported by research from Ian McGilchrist. This metaphor illustrates the profound divide between human logic and intuition. The rider represents the conscious, rational, and deliberate side of the mind that plans and analyzes, but it is relatively weak and easily exhausted. The elephant represents the automatic, emotional, and intuitive side, which is powerful, fast, and drives most of our behavior through deeply ingrained instincts and gut reactions. While the rider appears to be in charge, it ultimately serves the elephant; if the powerful elephant decides to go in a certain direction, the weak rider cannot stop it and instead often simply justifies the elephant’s actions post hoc.

Another way of thinking about this tendency is the difference between the GPU and the CPU in the computer context. The “rider” functions like a CPU: it represents the conscious, rational, and deliberate side of the mind that handles logic and planning, but it is relatively weak and easily exhausted. The “elephant” is akin to the GPU: it is the automatic, emotional, and intuitive side of the brain that operates with immense speed and power, driving the vast majority of our behavior. Just as the tech industry has repurposed the massive, specialized processing power of the GPU for complex tasks like cryptographic or AI functions, humans can leverage the highly trained, automatic, visual processing, parts of their brains to efficiently solve new problems across different domains. However, because the logical CPU (the rider) cannot simply command the powerful GPU (the elephant) to change its course by brute force, you must “train” or “program” this intuitive center by feeding it narrative-based analogies, images, and metaphors that it naturally understands.

I believe that what the persistent metaphors of calligraphy and forging steel are doing is accessing the amazing powers of the Elephant/GPU part of the human brain.

One of the most interesting examples of this is the House-Tree-Person (HTP) test, developed by psychologist John N. Buck in 1948. The HTP is a widely used projective psychological assessment technique in which individuals (especially children!) are asked to draw a house, a tree, and a person on separate sheets of paper, often followed by questions about the drawings to elicit verbal associations. Rooted in projection theory, the test assumes that these simple, unstructured drawings serve as a window into the subconscious, revealing personality traits, emotional states, family dynamics, self-image, anxieties, and interpersonal attitudes through symbolic elements: the house typically reflects one’s sense of home, security, and family relationships; the tree symbolizes growth, vitality, and inner strength (e.g. trunk for ego stability, branches for outreach); and the person represents self-perception and social functioning. In children, the drawings often display surprising detail and emotional accuracy, such as exaggerated features, missing windows symbolizing isolation, leaning structures indicating instability, tiny figures suggesting low self-esteem, or vibrant yet chaotic scenes betraying underlying turmoil, far beyond what their conscious verbal explanations might convey.

This phenomenon exemplifies “querying the GPU” in the Elephant-and-Rider analogy (extended to computer architecture): the child’s rational mind (the CPU/Rider) is minimally engaged in deliberate, logical planning or self-censorship during the task, allowing the intuitive, pattern-recognizing “Elephant” (GPU) to be directly queried through a simple, narrative-like prompt (”draw a house”). The GPU-like emotional/intuitive system, trained on a lifetime of immersive sensory and affective experiences rather than explicit reasoning, outputs richly detailed, symbolically loaded images that capture subconscious truths with startling precision and emotional fidelity, much like how a well-trained neural network generates vivid, contextually apt visuals or narratives from evocative cues, bypassing step-by-step analysis to reveal what the conscious Rider might suppress or rationalize.

There is no reason to believe that this effect goes away in adults, especially as they confront large data sets whose scale prevents conscious evaluation. While a general, particularly an ancient general, likely cannot consciously analyze sufficient data to understand if his troops are “combat ready” he likely CAN ask the GPU, the elephant, the visual processing parts of his brain, “If my troops were a sword, is it well forged?”

This is not to say that some psychic power is in operation, quite the opposite. The brain is only using the information that you have given it, as you walk through the camp. It also is using YOUR trained instincts. An unqualified general who does not know what a proper Roman drill looks like, will not be well served by even the best metaphor, because his instincts are not trained on what excellence in the underlying domains looks like. Likely this is a critical part of what it means for domains to be “related.” Implicitly, some set of instincts about what the success strategy for the old domain are true of the new domain, that is they ACTUALLY lead to success in the new domain.

Distant Domains

But what happens when domains are “distant?” What if world in which you trained your instincts and the world you now seek to enter are foreign and alien to one another.

Your instincts will actually mislead you, because the rules of the game are completely different. This is why the illusion of universal “agency” is so dangerous. No matter what level of “agency” you approach the problem with, no matter how excellent the metaphor that governs your mental frameworks, if the rules work differently (as they apparently do between software engineering and geopolitics), then even the most talented people will withdraw in confusion.

Certain domains are so different that you simply MUST humble yourself and develop a whole new set of metaphors and skills that allow you to achieve success in the NEW domain. To be clear, I am very confident that such humility, and even a sense of allowing a piece of your identity to die in order to move forward, is what REAL agency looks.

The Cult of the Expert

But that humility is hard in a world where our society has fallen into a diseased mindset that I call the “Cult of the Expert.”

We worship authorized experts as assiduously as ancient pagans worshipped their priest-kings. In the West, public schooling has trained us to constantly seek “permission structures” before we act. The unwritten rule of modern life is this: If you are not one of the top ten experts in the world on a given subject, you have no legal right or moral responsibility to question the rules.

This causes organizational paralysis. For example, many elite consulting firms suffer from what we might call the “Harvard problem”. They know the Ivy League is producing worse and worse candidates, but if you suggest they hire talented people from outside those specific schools, they look at you like you’ve just asked them to commit a religious sin. They are terrified of making a discretionary judgment without the permission structure of an elite credential.

I believe this is because the apotheosis of the expert functions as the last initiation ritual in western society. In healthy cultures, an initiation ritual is a formative process in which cultural authorities provide men with explicit instructions regarding the specific domains they are expected to master. The primary purpose of these rituals is to instill a profound concept of duty that allows men to act with absolute certainty, firmly establishing that opting out or cowardice is not an option. The specific domains tested and imparted during these rituals directly reflect the skills a society deems essential for men, particularly those of rank, to uphold.

For example, in ancient Greece, young men were enrolled in a phratry (fraternity) where they were required to demonstrate physical prowess, such as holding a shield properly from thigh to neck (“thigh to neck!” says Leonidas), alongside mental and moral fitness, proving to the community that they were neither cowards nor liars before they could eventually ascend to political power or eldership. Similarly, the archetype of medieval European nobility required an aristocrat to master three specific domains of animal husbandry, the horse, hound, hawk; and three more of warfare: sword, bow, and lance (more on that in a future post). By requiring the rigorous mastery of these specific cultural and martial technologies, initiation rituals serve as the crucial vetting mechanisms that bind a man to his society and prepare him to execute its most vital functions.

But here is the truth that every builder of a Great House must accept: at no point in human history has the domains which your culture rewards with the social status of initiation (i.e. top ten “expert” in some highly technical aspect of computer science) been LESS related to the critical human domains of marriage, parenting, faith, leadership. Additionally, there are discrete differences in personality that will show up any type of domain mastery society. This again means, that the type of person that will be successful in our society is related to the type of person whose core interests allow him to master the dominant technologies (which frequently means the technologies that are economically rewarded, especially at the lower levels of success).

And yet, there are essential human domains, and this IS the case for the right type of agency. You are not one of the top ten experts in the world at being a husband. You are not one of the top ten experts in the world at being a father. You are probably not the number one manager on earth. And yet you MUST rise to the occasion.

Marriage, parenting, faith, and leading your local community require vastly more high-agency actors than there are available “experts”. If your only framework for taking action is waiting for an expert to give you a permission structure, you will fail in the domains that actually matter. You must act with agency in these everyday domains, even if you are not globally ranked in ANY skill. In fact, even if you ARE a domain master, or even a top ten “expert” having achieved the financial freedom and social apotheosis that status confers, you will STILL need to humble yourself and learn the real habits of agency that the domain mastery of the human skills represents.

The Challenge

It is time to stop pretending that master of one domain, or even the attainment of that lauded expert status is a universal magic wand that allows you to solve all problems in all domains. What holds our high status experts back is that instead of submitting to the humbling process of learning a new domain, they try to force the rest of the world to conform to the one domain they already know. Having said that, the rest of us have to recognize that mastery in certain domains does confer success advantages in earning power, in growing asset values, and in getting people financial freedom or even financial power.

We are still just beginning to try and understand the massive shifts that have come in our culture from AI. We also appear to be at a critical time as more and more people are talking about aristocracy and building Great Houses. My hope that this distinction between Universal Agency, and the more limited concepts of domain mastery provides benefit to you all. Critically, I think it is important to recognize that we WILL not go back to the technologies of yesteryear and therefore the personality profiles that were selected by prior “tech stacks” will NOT necessarily reappear… unless of course we make them. My hope is to share my thoughts on what that might look like in the coming weeks.

See you soon!

Over the last few posts, we have been laying the groundwork for what it actually takes to build a multi-generational legacy. In Civilization and Its Pillars, we established that the flat, safe spaces of our society only exist because vertical, hierarchical Great Houses bear the weight. In The Iterative Game, we discussed how these structures are held together by long-term bonds of honor and reputation. And most recently, in The Two Games: Are You Playing for Life or Running from Death?, we looked at the necessity of creating a bounded space where your people are secure enough to stop fighting for bare survival and start building for legacy.

But this brings us to a crucial question. Once you have built the Pillar, established the Iterative Game, and created a Game of Life for your people... how do you keep it?

The modern, managerial assumption is that once you acquire wealth and power, then you have arrived at a new state of grace. Wealth becomes a mathematical fact of your bank account or a natural law of your bloodline. You hit your exit, liquidate your relationships, and walk away with a pile of money to spend on whatever you want. You can be a passive investor and the “8th wonder of the world” compound interest along with all of the other growth opportunities of our modern financial system will keep funding your family forever.

‘Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves,’ the proverb that says that a wealthy family will find themselves reduced back to slavery in three generations or less has an almost 90% success rate (based on pre-Covid numbers). An often unstated corollary to this is an assumption that the fall of the family is precipitated by a loss of money. Something must have gone wrong in the business, or the money markets, or perhaps you entrusted your wealth to the wrong people. But there is a deep belief that money makes the man, wealth makes the family, and the only qualifications you need to keep money is having already made it.

I am here to tell you that if you want to build a Great House, you have to abandon this idea completely. Successful Great Houses interact with their wealth and power not as a natural right, but as the result of a covenant. They have struck a deal with God, the universe, or whatever higher power they believe in. And if they wish to continue enjoying the blessings of that deal, they BELIEVE that they must keep their end of the bargain.

The reality is that most families do not decline because they have run out of money they run out of money because their family has gone into decline. It is true that occasionally there are great injustices where a healthy, stable family loses their money before losing their virtue. However, over and over again, I have seen situations where the financial engine was still operating with great effectiveness, and the merely wealth realized too late that what they were running out of was family itself.

“Guard This Gate”

Let’s start with a phrase: “Guard this gate.” In our modern English, if an employer tells you to guard a gate, there is an implied ending date. You guard it until the end of your shift, or the end of the week, or the end of your deployment.

In the ancient world, “guard this gate” meant something entirely different. It meant: You and your sons, and your sons’ sons, will guard this gate until the ending of your lineage or the ending of the world.

The command to “Guard the gate” included an authorization, to live in the city, to wield weapons, to extract reasonable fees so that the gate could be maintained and so that the gatekeeper could be fed, marry, sire sons, and train those sons to train their sons to train their sons to…. Guard this Gate. Forever. World Without End (as the Anglicans say).

This is the essence of a calling, a covenantal duty. A Great House understands that its position in society is tied to a specific, enduring responsibility. They don’t view their wealth as a random stroke of luck or a mere product of their own raw IQ. They view it as a stewardship. They know, down in their bones, that their power and protection are downstream of the fact that they are guarding the gate. If they ever leave that post, the blessing will be stripped away.

Modern society struggles with this concept because we have internalized a false moral imperative that profit is inherently rapacious and immoral (as are all right-coded things). We falsely believe that aforesaid rapacious for-profit activity must constantly be balanced by non-profit activity which is good and nice (as all left-coded things are). If you feel this way, then first of all you have internalized communism and you need to repent as an absolute prerequisite to building or belonging to a Great House. Then, after you have repented, you must study the primary enterprise of the family upon whose virtuous strength your House is built. This is because the primary way by which a legacy family blesses the world is by guarding their particular gate, which almost certainly INCLUDES (but is not limited to)1 the primary enterprise of the family.

This is why so many founders and fathers have told me with tears in their eyes, about how after their exit, after their great big financial boost, that they “lost their calling” and frequently their children with it. So what do the legacy families that form great houses do differently?

Defining the Family Purpose and the Delegation of Duty

Successful legacy families know exactly what their family purpose is. This does not mean that every descendant works in the same family business or even enjoys the family purpose. However, they all know exactly what the family is intended for.

Returning to the metaphor of guarding the gate, this is not a job that requires every single person in the bloodline to stand watch. If the original guard has five children, and they each have five children, with every generation an increasingly smaller percentage of the family will physically guard the gate. By contrast if disaster strikes and a family is lacking qualified adults, they may use extraordinary means to fulfill the family covenant. They might utilize their financial resources to hire a non-family member to guard the gate for a period of time until the children are old enough to take over the duty. (Though obviously there is serious risk of the family duty being breached or corrupted during this time).

There is immense freedom in this reality. Ensuring that the gate is guarded does not mean you personally must hold the spear. If a child has different gifts, they are not constrained, but the family as a whole must ensure the mission is completed. Because multi-generational structures require hierarchy, those who are closest to fulfilling the core purpose—those actually guarding the gate—must stand higher in the family hierarchy regarding wealth control and decision-making. The reason is (based on the covenantal theory at the heart of the family’s identity) if those actually serving as guards fail in their charge, the family as a whole will suffer.

The core identity of a legacy family is the unified belief that their wealth, power, and status are all downstream of the fact that the gate is actively being guarded. They know deep in their souls that if the gate is left unguarded, their protection will be stripped away. Families may frame this in different ways:

• Mystical terms: We have a deal with God, and if we break it, we will be cursed.

• Psychological terms: Keeping this promise is core to our self-identity; breaking it will cause us to self-sabotage and make foolish decisions until we are ruined.

• Conspiratorial terms: If we do not keep our promises, “they” will come and get us.

• Social terms: We occupy our position because society respects us; if we break our promise, we lose that respect and we will be harmed.

Regardless of the framing, the baseline truth is a claim, that is reinforced by EVERY LEVEL of the family’s identity producing activities, that if the family causes specific outcomes to persist, they will enjoy unusual success.

The Dynamics of Unusual Success

What does unusual success look like? There is an apocryphal story often repeated at legacy conferences regarding a shipping and logistics family in New England. A son had a terrible fight with his father and left on bad terms. The next morning, the family attorney handed the son a check for ten thousand dollars and informed him he was no longer welcome on family property. The son traveled to Houston and invested the money into the exact same type of business that his father ran. Within five years, the father and son reconciled. They went over the account books and calculated that the son’s business was now worth fifty million dollars. The father wrote in the ledger: “Five years. 5000 times ROI. Good investment.”

That is the absolute pinnacle of unusual success. It is the equivalent of a machine where you insert money and receive a five-thousand-times multiple in return.

When people ask how to find their family purpose, the answer is to look for where you (or your ancestors) had unusual success. You are looking for a domain, a calling, or a gifting where everything lines up perfectly. If you do not possess the capacity to found a Great House yourself (and to be clear not everyone is called to be a founder) you must look for a person for whom these gifts line up. Your path may be to form a group around a founder with the capacity for unusual success, push them until they establish a Great House, and trust that they will remember you when they come into their kingdom.

A less extreme example of unusual success is the chiropractor family. A father possesses a unique technique in chiropractic medicine. It is a true net good that improves the world. The father experiences unusual success compared to average chiropractors.

In our story let us say that the father has three children: an artsy child, an argumentative child, and an obsessive-compulsive child. Society might view this as a failure because none of the children are chiropractors. However, God gave the family those specific children on purpose. They are the marketing director, the lawyer, and the accountant. The family does not need three more chiropractors; they need fifty more chiropractors working for them. They need marketing to feed the clinics, legal contracts to manage the employees, and accounting to track the revenue across multiple locations.

The healthy legacy family viewpoint is one where the children view preserving and advancing the technique, the gift given by God, as their central mission and their direct source of wealth.

The Magic Kingdom and the Purpose of Inheritance

When a family experiences this kind of unusual success, they naturally want to pass it down. But inheritance in a Great House is never just about dividing up a pile of cash equally among descendants so they can buy luxury cars. Inheritance is for a purpose.

Imagine a magic kingdom. You have giants on the northern border and dragons to the south. The King grants your family a magnificent, glorious castle on the northern border. It has incredible stone walls, deep wells, and rich surrounding farmlands. It is a beautiful inheritance.

But the castle is not yours so you can sell it to the highest bidder and retire to a beach. The castle is yours so that your family can fight the giants.

If you see the dragonslaying lance, covered in gems, and carrying with it magical blessings of speed, strength and protection from fire. Asking for that lance is not a license to strip the jewels off or dance in magma for fun. He who wields the dragonslaying lance is assuming a responsibility to slay dragons.

When a Great House passes down its wealth, it is passing down the castle or the lance. The father looks at the son and says, “Here is the mission, we have given you the wisdom, and we WILL give you the resources to be successful.” If the son obeys the wisdom and uses the resources to fulfill the mission, he generates success in the real world. He then returns honor back to the family, completing the cycle of inheritance and ensuring the covenant remains unbroken.

Don’t Let your Children Cut their Hair

The Biblical figure Samson had three specific rules as a Nazarite: do not eat strange food, do not sleep with strange women, and do not cut your hair. Samson did not lose his grace and his unusual success until he broke ALL THREE RULES.

Now I want you to imagine that our dragon-slaying lance from above comes with similar rules, perhaps you must never drink alcohol on Sunday, or you must always sleep on a bed of straw, or some other fairy tale rules. But if you break these rules, no matter how strange or silly, then the magic will fail and the grace will depart from you and the next time you face a dragon… then, like Samson, you will die.

Now the point of the silliness of the fairy tale rules is because when people are young and immature, when they do not understand the BASIS of the power that their family wields, even the most reasonable rules seem silly. But there is no way to develop the character you will need to be successful without keeping them.

This is made harder because we now frequently hand young people an inheritance of pure liquid trouble (ie money). As Johann Kurtz mentions in his most excellent book “Leaving a Legacy” there is an incredible benefit to leaving illiquid assets to your children. In large part, I believe that this is because physical things have a telos, a purpose embodied in them. The nature of the land or the business, or the asset implies the noble character that is necessary to successfully keep that asset, and their ancestor’s success in managing the asset gives them a basis for understanding the core elements of his character.

But in the modern age, inheritances are forced by the modern financial and tax system to include ENORMOUS amounts of liquidity. And the great and terrible property of money is that it is fungible. That is, one bucket of money appears for all purposes identical to any other bucket of money. This makes it even more important that families explicitly lay out the mission that they believe that they are on. Again, this is because THE thing that will allow their descendants to continue accessing their unusual success it is keeping the terms of the covenant that their ancestors struck.

The Five Points of the Family Covenant

So how do you actually structure this deal within your own family? Successful legacy families usually have a family covenant, whether they call it that or not. Here is a framework drawn from Gary North’s short book God’s Covenants that is surprisingly relevant when analyzing the history of the families that built the best parts of American corporate culture.

1. The Transcendent Purpose: The enduring “why” of the family. What is the specific virtue or net good that God has tasked your family with bringing to the world?

2. Delegation and Hierarchy: Who is in charge of what? You need clear lines of authority to ensure the mission actually gets executed.

3. Ethical Guidelines: This is the list of virtuous things the founder did that created the success in the first place. These are your operating principles.

4. Obligations and Territory: What specific domain are you called to steward? (This is always subject to expansion as your children develop new gifts).

5. Succession: The goal is not to sell everything and exit. The goal is to successfully hand the keys to the next generation so they can continue to exercise virtuous authority.

Many of the leaders of the last century have written books detailing their understanding of their covenant with God. Joel Salatin, the godfather of the modern regenerative agriculture movement, documented his multi-generational plan in Family Friendly Farming: A Multi-Generational Home-Based Business Testament. Jim Wilson detailed how to take a strategic geographic spot in his book Principles of War. The Wilson family, led by their witty if controversial patriarch Doug Wilson, has by faithfully following his father’s God-given insight generated outsized influence not just in Moscow Idaho, but across the Reformed Christian world. The late Ellsworth McIntyre established a framework for profitable Christian daycares.

What many of these families have unfortunately NOT acknowledged is that these callings are highly attuned to specific examples. Ellsworth McIntyre is the best example. His book contains incredibly detailed business plans, IP, and essentially everything that someone needs to start a Christian daycare. In Ellsworth’s opinion ANYONE could do it, and it was one of the great unsolved mysteries to him why more people did not. In my view, the McIntyre family possessed (and possesses) a highly unique gifting that could not simply be handed to strangers, which aligns perfectly with the Great House framework.

The Challenge

In conclusion, I give you the metaphor of the great tree that reaches up to the heavens and provides stability and shelter for all who dwell beneath its branches. The tree I suppose is just another way of framing the pillar. Many of us grew up as the beneficiaries of these great pillars. We experienced well-ordered cities, respected private property, and guaranteed public safety. These blessings did not occur by accident. They existed because unseen Great Houses—families who operated local banks, managed urban development, and maintained the social fabric—did the heavy lifting to provide those blessings to the culture.

We are currently living in a time of peak change. The old trees are falling, and the ancient pillars holding up the sky are collapsing. You may be the only person in your entire county capable of possessing this vision. You are placed in the position of Frodo Baggins holding the One Ring. You may not have desired to be born into this specific era, but the burden has fallen to you.

We have two choices. We can allow the pillars to fall, resulting in our descendants living in economic collapse and urban slums. Alternatively, we can step forward and shoulder the immense burden of holding up a piece of the sky.

Inheritance is not given to a child simply for breathing. Inheritance must be given to those who are willing to shoulder a mighty burden and slay the dragons at the border. The ultimate goal is to defend, maintain, and support our civilization in her day of distress. If we succeed and serve as the foundational pillars through the next several decades of turbulence, our families will emerge on the other side as the Great Houses of the next historical cycle. It is a mighty task, but it contains enormous glory and is the greatest possible blessing you can bestow upon your descendants.

Let’s get to work.

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In the last post, I introduced the concept of iterative v. transactional games. But the truth is that all of us are iterating, unless we drop dead at the end of a trade we do in fact continue on beyond any individual transaction. And so the transactional frame is just an illusion that is frequently used to justify bad behavior. The truth is that you ARE playing a long-term game, the question is: What ethic are you embodying?

As is hopefully clear, by now, in this circle we evaluate norms and outcomes by the desire to build a multi-generational Great House. By contrast, modern Western culture operates on a default setting that assumes every interaction, every business deal, and every relationship is a Death Game.

But if you play a Death Game with your family, your legacy will shatter. To build something that lasts, you have to learn how to play a Game of Life.

Here is the difference between the two, and why understanding them is the key to building a high-trust, unstoppable team.

The Death Game: War to the Knife

A Death Game is any game where you are wagering your life, your liberty, or your livelihood on the outcome.

You recognize that cadence, don’t you? It sounds a lot like the Declaration of Independence, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” But I was raised Baptist, and I like alliteration, so I prefer “Livelihood.” And frankly, in the cold, hard reality of our economy, the “pursuit of happiness” usually relies entirely on your livelihood—your ability to put food on the table for your wife and children.

If you lose this game, you do not just drop a rank on a leaderboard; you lose your ability to feed your family, you go to jail, or you literally die. Because the stakes are existential, men will do almost anything—lie, cheat, and kill—to avoid losing. A Death Game is war.

Here is the terrifying reality of a Death Game: Men will kill rather than lose such games.

Unless a man has a profound, restraining religious conviction, if you threaten his life, his freedom, or his ability to feed his children, he will burn the world down to win. And when you structure a corporation or a society as a Death Game, you are incentivizing everyone around you to break any rule in order to win, or at least not to lose.

The tragedy of the modern corporate environment is that it is entirely structured as a Death Game. You are not just facing risks from outside competitors; there is malevolence inside the room. The people you sit next to in the breakroom—the people you rely on—might decide you are weak and “eat you” to advance their own careers. In this environment, you are constantly fighting on two fronts: the external market and your internal colleagues.

Corporate Sabotage

This isn’t just theory. I remember reading about a massive liability case involving General Electric years ago. It took them seven years of discovery to figure out what went wrong. Do you know what they found?

They found that there were three separate groups within the company actively sabotaging each other, and it was the COMBINATION of those three acts of independent sabotage, that caused the defect that went on to cost their company tens of millions of dollars. In theory they were on the same team! But because they were playing a corporate Death Game—where one guy’s promotion meant another guy’s demise—they destroyed their own product.

That is the modern industrial Economy. It means that the people you are in a room with people who you eat lunch with, people you joke with, might actually be actively working to harm you and the company upon which you are dependent. This omnipresent malevolence is a constant burden, creating stress, burnout and occasionally violence.

Escape is the Strategy

Because of this, people in a Death Game are motivated entirely by fear. They want to hit their number, get their “F-U money,” and escape the game forever. But there is a poison pill here. These people associate making money (and likely any other form of success or power) with playing a deathgame. This makes them conflate weakness with virtue, and leaves them unable to provide for their children. They either wind up either financially or morally bankrupt.

The great tragedy about the F-U people is that by withdrawing from the game entirely, they condemn their children to the default death game of our morally bereft culture. Certain key founders and funders such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen are the exceptions that prove the rule. As Palmer Luckey once said “are you going to be Batman? Or are you going to be you?”

When I talk to such people, the reason they withdraw from the game, the reason they refuse to “be Batman” is that they are universally CONVINCED that the Death Game is all there is, and many of them have heart-wrenching stories that demonstrate why they think that. But if all they can build is a death game, well of COURSE they are going to put their kids as far from that as possible. If their children must play a death game (which many of them believe) they want that to happen far far away, from them.

So I always start with, but what if you COULD? What if you COULD establish a game of life? Because of course we can build “Games of Life.” And interestingly enough some of the most successful organizations in history figured this out a long time ago.

The GM Strategy: Removing the Fear

Let’s look at General Motors. I’m not talking about the GM of today, but the industrial titan of the mid-20th century. They understood something about human nature that we have forgotten.

GM had a program for their top leadership—specifically for the men they wanted to run their massive factories. Before a man could become a plant manager, the company would do something extraordinary. They would structure his stock and compensation in such a way that he became, for all intents and purposes, independently wealthy.

Think about the psychology of that.

Before they handed him the keys to the factory, they essentially said to him, “If the game is survival, you have already won. If what drives you is the fear of going hungry, you can stop playing right now.”.

They took “Livelihood” off the table as a risk. Why? Because they didn’t want a manager who was making decisions based on whether he could make his mortgage payment next month. They didn’t want a man ruled by fear. They wanted a man who was free to make the hard, right decisions for the long-term health of the plant, without looking over his shoulder.

They elevated him from a servant working for wages to a partner playing for honor. While its hard to imagine this happening (or even being financially possible) in today’s cut-throat manufacturing environment, this occurred at several major American companies within living memory.

The Consultant’s Choice

We see a similar dynamic in the highest tiers of elite consulting firms, even to this day.

Now, anyone who has been exposed to the world of consulting or top level law firms can tell you getting there is a grind. The life of an associate is actually an almost perfect example of a death game. But once you reach that top tier, nearing the partnership level, where you are on the cusp of being a “made man” you enter a different kind of game.

Many of these firms will give a potential partner an entire year sabbatical, at full pay. This gives the potential partner time to mentally regroup. In many cases, frequently before the sabbatical is over the consultant will reach out to the firm with some variation of: “Please let me back in. I want to do the high-level consulting. I want to go get the clients. I want to handle the high-stakes situations.”

In some cases, these high level thinkers and workers discover a love for life and family, or a purpose outside of the high-stakes world of the firm that means they want to find a new direction in life.

Both of these outcomes are actually of benefit to the firm. While they can build systems to manage the associate slaves in their brutal death games, partners have to be a different kind of animal. You aren’t there because you have to be. You are there because you want to be.

Because a partner is secure, they are playing for the thrill of the game. They are playing for status, for victory, and for the satisfaction of excellence. They are playing a ultimately, a Game of Life.

The Definition of Honor

This brings us to the most critical definition for those of us trying to build a Great House.

When you are playing a Death Game—where losing means you lose your ability to feed your children—you will eventually cheat. You will lie. You will sabotage your neighbor. You will do whatever it takes to survive.

But in a Game of Life, we operate by a different rule.

Honor means we would rather Lose than cheat.

We can say that because we know that even if we lose this round, even if we lose status, we will not lose our brotherhood. We will not starve. Our children will not be cast out.

Because we have a floor, we have the luxury, and the duty, of Honor. We can afford to be Great Men, and Great Men build Great Houses.

The Ultimate Strategy: Playing the Death Game as a Team

Does playing a Game of Life mean we all hold hands and sing songs while the world eats us alive? Not at all. The Death Game of the outside world never goes away; it is the reality of a fallen world.

But a Game of Life is fundamentally a team sport.

A Great House is a bounded space. Inside the walls, between the band of brothers, there is absolute security. You are training, competing, and sharpening each other in a Game of Life. Even when you compete, it is a form of training, an honest metric to ensure that the best of your are going to face the outside world. But when you step outside those walls, you are facing the Death Game of the world together, as a unified team.

You look at the men and women in your House and you say, “Out there, it is a war. But in here, it is one for all and all for one. We win or lose together.”

If you want to build a legacy that outlasts you, you must stop treating the people you rely on as if they are disposable. You must build a House where your children and partners know they are safe from the knife, so they can turn their weapons outward and conquer the world.

In the last post, we established that Civilization is a flat platform resting on vertical Pillars.

We learned that the “level playing fields” we crave—the stock market, the voting booth, the open marketplace—are artificial. They are luxuries that can only exist because Great Houses (the Pillars) are bearing the weight of the unequal and uneven reality underneath our beautiful flat places.

But this raises a critical question: How do the Pillars hold together?

If generational continuity is the means by which a Great House grows tall enough to “make the low places high” how does that continuity operate? The answer lies in understanding that there are two fundamentally different ways to interact with other human beings: The Transactional Game and The Iterative Game.

The Flea Market (The Transactional Game)

The “flat space” is built for the Transactional Game. Think of a flea market. You walk up to a table. You see an item. You ask the price. You haggle. You hand over cash. You walk away.

In a purely transactional game:

• The relationship ends the moment the deal closes.

• Memory is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if you like the guy. It doesn’t matter if he’s a good father. All that matters is: Is the item worth the cash?

• There is no future. You never have to see him again. If your transactional win causes this man to fail at life you will likely never know, let alone be forced to deal with the societal burden (except when it comes time to pay your taxes).

This is efficient for buying commodities. It is efficient for a stock market. But it is a terrible way to build a life, and it is an impossible way to build a civilization.

The problem is that modern culture has convinced us that everything should be a transaction. We treat our employers, our neighbors, and even our spouses like vendors at a flea market. We are constantly asking, “Am I getting the best deal right now?”

This inevitably leads to short-term thinking and breaches of the deep moral obligations (which an earlier culture called covenants), that a man or woman of virtue has to the people around them. These breaches cause resentment in the “loser” who as Jordan Peterson notes, “tends to stack up at the bottom.” The transactional mindset frequently translates into treating PEOPLE as interchangeable cogs in the machine, leading an ever growing underclass whose dependence on the financialized winners feels very much like ownership. They even call themselves “wage-slaves.”

When the inefficiency of our modern incentive structure starts to expose itself (threatening to bring housing prices down or wages up in that natural cause and effect pattern that an earlier generation called capitalism) suddenly it is of vital importance to the powers that be that we import millions of immigrants who don’t know the score and are happy to take ANY deal that the modern welfare state can offer them.

To paraphrase a Game of Thrones line, “A man can own a wife or a knife, but not both.”

Or as my own grandfather was fond of saying: “You have to sleep sometimes.”

While the consequences of a short-term transactional mindset may not appear in a quarterly report or even a 5-year plan, not all games allow you to run away in a golden parachute and leave the shareholders holding the bag. Especially not games involving family.

Even if by some strange miracle you really can fool all the people all the time, if you make your money creating losers your children will NOT want to play the same game you did.

Because the reality is that there ARE always consequences for transactional behavior, whether that is an individual person going bankrupt or a productive business being chopped up by private equity with the debts pawned off (through the miracle of modern bankruptcy laws) on the US Taxpayer. Many successful Transactional Players do not see those consequences, because success in transactional games almost requires them to narrow their vision to the “level playing field” which they consider their domain, without acknowledging that when players drop out of the field they rarely cease to exist entirely.

As a cautionary tale, I will note that their children are unlikely to be so blinkered in their perception of reality. The Next Generation sees, and have likely ALWAYS seen the people whom the Transactional Players are hurting and ignoring, and they by and large want no part in it.

Now being transactional is NOT the same as having healthy boundaries and limits on who is allowed to join the flat spaces that you (or more likely your Great House) is a guardian over. One of the worst tragedies about modernity, is that sometimes the older generation DOES sacrifice greatly to be virtuous and their descendants are brainwashed into believing the worst about them. But let us not kid ourselves, sometimes the reason why the next generation leave in disgust is because their parents had no moral center beyond the very next short-term dollar.

The Iterative Game (The Infinite Game)

By contrast, those who are Pillars of Civilization—the Great Houses—play by a different set of rules. They play an Iterative Game (or what Simon Sinek calls the “Infinite Game”).

In an iterative game:

• The players repeat. You are going to see this person tomorrow, next year, and in ten years.

• The roles switch. Today you have the money, and he needs the job. Tomorrow, you need the favor, and he has the skill.

• Reputation is the currency. Because you have to play again, your ability to keep promises is worth more than the profit from any single deal.

The Psychology of Risk: Secure and At-Risk Success Strategies

To understand how iterative business relationships actually work, a useful place to start is the psychological framework of Love and Respect. In a marriage, we often say that men primarily need Respect (honor) and women primarily need Love (security and safety). Likely a more productive way to frame this dynamic is that the success strategy of the Husband (the Secure Partner), the way for him to get what he wants, is to show love to his wife (which gives her feelings of safety and security), and the success strategy of the Wife (the At-Risk Partner) is to show honor and respect to her more powerful husband.

Imbalances of power occur in basically every useful business relationship. In a business context between men, the success strategy of the Secure Partner is to credibly offer safety and security to the At-Risk Partner, while the success strategy of At-Risk Partner is to give honor to the Secure Partner. But the nature of counter-party risk means that these roles will switch and switch back over the course of the contractual cycle.

Let me give you a practical example:

The Homeowner and the Contractor.

When you hire a contractor, you start with the money. In our culture, we say you have the “whip hand.” You are in the dominant position, psychologically occupying the Secure Party role. You have the power. Because you hold the power, the contractor (in the At-Risk position) instinctively knows he needs to show you Respect. He signals honor to you to get the job. Conversely, for you to get him to agree to the work, you have to offer him Safety—you have to make him feel secure that the job is real and he won’t be stiffed.

But to get the job done, you have to write a large check to get the job started (usually for materials). The moment you hand that check over, the power dynamic flips. Now the contractor has your money, but you have not yet received the commensurate benefit. You are now in the vulnerable position; you have psychologically flipped into the At-Risk role. You are relying on him to show up. This is what called counter-party risk.

Counterparty Risk.

Because you are now vulnerable, your needs change. You no longer need him to bow to you; you need reassurance. You need him to create a sense of safety and security. You need him to say, “I’m taking care of you. The crew is coming. It’s going to be alright”. If he fails to provide that “Love” (security), you will panic.

In a Transactional Game, this is a moment of terror. Will he run off? Will he do a bad job? The rookie move is for the Homeowner is to attempt to assert dominance over the Contractor, not realizing that he is currently the At-Risk Party. Meanwhile in a counter-intuitive way, those players who can mentally switch into Respect Mode, showing honor to the contractor and to his workers, praising even the smallest things that they do right, and graciously overlooking their faults (when possible) tend to get work that is good, fast, AND reasonably priced. They have invoked a fourth element that transcends the transactional paradigm, “being a good deal partner.”

As we have all been told, financial leverage summons economic production from the future and brings it into the present. Being a good deal partner does the exact same thing by summoning social capital from the future. Because others desire to do future business with you, that potential future regulates their current behavior. This puts you at the front of the line for quality work, without requiring the incredible markup that the arrogant “rich guy” tends to get stuck with.

So to summarize, you start with the dominant position, and negotiate terms. Then you hand the contractor the power (the money). He provides the safety (the assurance and the work) and hands the power back (the finished product). To get the best work out of him while he holds the power, you continue to send Respect up the chain—honoring his skill and his crew—while he sends Love (security) down to you. Then you complete the transaction, concluding what folks call the contractual cycle.

If you want to be successful in business, you must learn to play both roles—to flawlessly switch between the dominant partner providing gracious security and the vulnerable partner conveying requests with noble admiration, WITHOUT losing your identity. In general, the faster and more frequently you can engage in this switch in roles, the MORE SUCCESSFUL you will be in business and in life.

There is a word that is used to describe someone who is capable of playing both roles without compromising their internal character, and that word is HONOR.

Honor is a Strategy

This brings us to the core secret of the Great House:

If you are playing a game that lasts longer than 10 years, strategy and honor are indistinguishable. You cannot possibly predict who matters, and who will matter, longer than the next three months. Because of this you likewise cannot predict which players will be occasionally involved in your world, or even a major partner. Remember any kind of iterative game means that you will find yourself the At-Risk Partner, at the mercy of the other party at least for some period of time for each deal.

You cannot win a multi-generational game by cheating, cutting corners, or maximizing short-term profit. You can only win by being the kind of person (or House) that people want to play with again and again. And because you DO NOT KNOW which are the “special people” that you will be dependent on (or in power over) in the future , you have to basically be that honorable person ALL THE TIME.

This is why people playing iterative games care deeply about how you treat your wife and children, and how your family feels about you. Those relationships are likely longer-term than the business or other social connections in your life. The incredible frequency (and incredible social and financial incentives) of divorce means that it is no longer rational to just exclude people based on that. It is also impractical and arguably illegal for employers to meet people’s families and evaluate their put-togetherness.

But, high-trust partners playing iterative games DO use your domestic conduct as a primary vetting mechanism. On some instinctive level, they know that a man who cannot empower and entrust things to the wife who shares his bed is incapable of maintaining honor with a business partner. The reality that you probably can only have one decision-making framework for long-term relationships with authority figures and dependents, makes the mistreatment of family a catastrophic signal of unreliability.

A Great House is much more than one businessman who has recognized the need for personal honor in playing iterative games. A true Great House requires a group of people who have decided to stop playing the “Death Game” of the market—where losing means starvation—and start playing a “Game of Life” with each other (more on that in the next post). They say, “We are going to be here in 50 years. Our sons are going to work with your sons.”

But the journey to a Great House always STARTS with a commitment to an Iterative Game.

The Challenge

If you want to build a Great House, you have to stop treating your people like transactions.

• You cannot treat your children like employees who can be fired if they don’t perform.

• You cannot treat your business partners like lemons to be squeezed.

You have to build Covenantal Relationships. You have to signal to the world that you are playing the Long Game. Because in a world of crumbling sand and shifting markets, the only thing stable enough to hold up the roof is a promise kept across generations.

Do you want to build a Great House? Then stop measuring “wins” by how many people felt like they “lost” when dealing with you and start building a reputation for stability.

Hello friends,

Welcome to the Avalon Circle Substack. If you are here you are almost certainly part of that emerging movement in our country and our world that is concerned with civilizational projects. In part this is the story of every generation, as civilization must be renewed against the twin onslaughts of an ever-changing technical landscape, and the unchanging realities of imperfect human nature. But there is a sense, and I think it is a true one, that the challenges to civilization are particularly profound in our day.

For instance, in most times and places we would not need to start an inquiry with “What exactly IS civilization?

Is Civilization… FLAT?

When we think of civilization, we tend think of organized complexity built on top of level playing fields. These “flat spaces” are characterized by a set of conditions where individuals or entities can compete or interact as equals, regardless of their background.

• Modern corporations are funded by the “flat space” of stock markets which (we are told) efficiently conduct capital from anyone who has it to anyone who has a good idea, regardless of who their father was.

• Modern innovation is built on the“flat space” of university education. The idea is that we put all the smart kids in one place, grade them on a curve, and the cream in our meritocratic pail rises to the top to solve our problems.

• Modern politics is built on the “flat space” of “the marketplace of ideas.” We assume that all online forums are near perfect analogues of the ancient English town square and if we just let all “citizens of the world” speak to us about whatever they wish, at all times of day or night, without regard to the technologies being used, the best arguments will win and we will naturally move toward the truth.

Except... have you looked around lately?

Those “level playing fields” seem less and less level. The stock market feels rigged. The universities are producing conformity rather than innovation. The political marketplace is a shouting match where no one is listening. The complexity we built on top of these fields is less and less able to meet our most basic human needs.

What is happening?

The Minecraft Myth

The problem is that the modern myth assumes that the world is a series of flat places which naturally generate like the “Flatworld” setting of a Minecraft game. We think that “flat” is the default state of nature.

But that is not reality.

In the real world, if you go out into the woods, do you find perfectly graded soccer fields waiting for you? No. You find rocks, roots, cliffs, and swamps. The real world is jagged, crooked, and cruel.

You may even find a watery world of constant storms, with lightning crashing overhead and the only solid places being razor sharp crags rising from the oceans. This is a good description of the ancient concept of Khaos, the waters that existed before Fiat Lux brought a level of order under a protective firmament.

If you are playing a video game, you can build a flat place by simply adding more material out into the void on one side, and it just floats there. But if you see someone trying to do that in real life—trying to build a platform on thin air without support—you know it’s going to collapse.

Who Built This?

Whenever you see a level playing field in the real world, you have to ask one question: Who built this?

Who did the work to clear the trees? Who graded the dirt? Who creates the boundary that keeps the chaos out?

The reality is that flat spaces are artificial. They are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. And you cannot build them with other flat spaces. You have to build them on Pillars.

This is the great paradox of civilization: The only way to get the “level playing field” that we all want is to build “hierarchical pillars” that can support it.

To get the “flat places” that we want—those safe harbors for commerce and community—we have to build pillars. We have to construct hierarchies that are capable of handling the unequal reality of the world, bringing the low places high, and then those pillars can hold up the floor for everyone else.

The Household IS the Pillar

This brings us back to the Great House.

We tend to think of the “Village” or the “Assembly” as the ideal flat spaces—a place where equals come together to trade and govern. But a village isn’t made of disconnected individuals. A village is a “flat” organization made out of “vertical” organizations (more on this in a future post).

The Household is the pillar. It is the structure that bears the weight. It handles the jagged reality of the world—the sickness, the training of children, the accumulation of capital—so that the individual members can step out onto the “flat” field of the marketplace and interact as equals.

The Great Houses, and their subsidiary households, are the guarantors of successful generational transitions. It is they who stand in the gap to ensure that property, and position, and the intangible pieces of identity necessary for the continuation of a culture are preserved.

They do this not merely for themselves and their own dependents, but for EVERYONE in their community. The health and stability, the well-stewarded wealth of a people, is embodied in their Great Houses, often literally, which is why that name is associated with these key lineages.

They build pillars out of physical and spiritual families, from father to son, mother to daughter, teacher to student, generation to generation, with each successful transition raising the pillar of their line closer to the heavens. Or if you like, with every passing generation, they are capable of touching bedrock beneath a deeper and deeper abyss to support the beautiful cities that are built on top of their hidden foundations.

If you destroy the pillars—if you smash the Great Houses in the name of making everything flat—you don’t get a wider, freer world. You get a world where the jagged edges of the earth opens up and swallows you.

The Challenge

So, here is the reality. If we want to enjoy the benefits of a flat space—if we want safe markets, honest debates, and walkable neighborhoods—we have to stop pretending they happen by magic.

We have to start building the pillars. We have to build the Great Houses that act as the guarantors of ordered liberty. We need men and women willing to accept the burden of inequality—the burden of leadership and responsibility—so that they can create a bounded space where the “level playing field” can actually exist.

So when people ask why we need Great Houses? They are what is holding up the floor. And we need a lot more of them if we are going to preserve and advance the great Civilization that our ancestors wished to give to the generations that came after them and that we (if you are with us you know what I mean) desperately want to give to the generations that come after us.

Vivant Magnae Domus!