Psilocybin is a powerful compound found in a fungus. Whether you think of it as a hippie drug or a shortcut to satori, there’s no doubt it can be life-changing.

After one takes magic mushrooms, one can usually check off William James’s four dimensions of mystical experience. Such an experience is:

1. Nearly impossible to put into words (Ineffability);

2. Though inarticulable, confers knowledge (Noetic quality);

3. Comes and goes (Transiency); and

4. Cannot be initiated, but must be revealed (Passivity).

One experiences the fractal aesthetics of a brain making new connections. In some cases, the subject experiences ego dissolution or the stretching of time. The categories “I” and “we” aren’t so fixed anymore, either, as one comes to regard other perspectives as being portals into a greater Allmind.

Once the peak has passed, one is left with a residue of insight and a feeling of increased well-being. If nothing else, what one usually can articulate about a psychedelic experience is that one feels a more profound sense of connection to everything and everyone.

Even the most cynical atheists have come away describing the experience as spiritual. Still, a rational materialist might explain such experiences as simply the loss of contact with reality, that is, the consequence of eating something that futzes with normal brain chemistry.

For mystics, entheogens are a means of accessing a spiritual universe that is far vaster and more meaningful than the materialist mind can fully apprehend.

Can we stake out a sweet spot between these two poles?

The future might depend on it.

In 2008, neuroscientist Roland Griffiths and his team tested psilocybin in humans and followed the results for more than a year. Here is a summary of the results:

Participants were 36 hallucinogen-naïve adults reporting regular participation in religious/spiritual activities. Oral psilocybin (30 mg/70kg) was administered on one of two or three sessions, with methylphenidate (40 mg/70kg) administered on the other session(s). During sessions, volunteers were encouraged to close their eyes and direct their attention inward. At the 14-month follow-up, 58% and 67%, respectively, of volunteers rated the psilocybin-occasioned experience as being among the five most personally meaningful and among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; 64% indicated the experience increased well-being or life satisfaction; 58% met criteria for having had a “complete” mystical experience.

The preceding results are promising for many reasons, but in every such “complete mystical experience” there is surely the knowledge that we all are somehow connected, or at least that we should be.

If William James’s criteria are correct, translating mystical insights into a rationalist’s lexicon rather misses the point. Or as Louis Armstrong said when asked to describe jazz: “If you still have to ask, shame on you.” But we have to take a risk with that clumsy symbol system we call language. Our goal, after all, is to point to a new set of postpolitical values.

Those who have not taken an entheogen or had a complete mystical experience will probably regard this discussion with skepticism, even cynicism. What could our hippie friends possibly teach us about feeling more “connected” to humanity? And what could possibly be useful about these peak experiences otherwise?

Psychedelics have the potential quite literally to change one’s personality.

In fact, people not only report something like “it opened my mind,” but that the mind-opening persists. In a number of studies, psychologists have used the Big Five personality battery to test these reports.

The five dimensions of personality are represented in the acronym OCEAN. The first dimension is O, which stands for Openness to novelty and experience. People high in Openness tend to be intellectually curious, aesthetically attuned, interested in experiencing new things, and have active imaginations. Using substances, such as LSD and psilocybin, people can move higher on O temporarily (weeks), sometimes for longer periods (months).

Becoming more open-minded is one thing. But these substances have just as profound an effect on our moral psychology, particularly when it comes to authority.

In the journal Psychopharmacology, Taylor Lyons and Robin Carhart-Harris report on a pilot study showing that “psilocybin with psychological support might produce lasting changes in attitudes and beliefs.” Specifically, they conclude that nature-relatedness increased and authoritarianism decreased among subjects, even after many months. “At 7–12 months post-dosing, nature relatedness remained significantly increased (t(5)=−2.707, p=0.021) and authoritarianism remained decreased at trend level (t(5)=−1.811, p=0.065).” (Emphasis mine.)

Administered in responsible therapeutic settings, entheogens could be a path to reckoning with the profound changes ahead. Indeed, when we realize that personality is one of the strongest determinants of cultural values, we might conclude that psychedelics could be yet another technology for the coming era—whether in preparing for or catalyzing it.

We needn’t belabor this idea, though.

The point is that it will be important to open our minds, consider new perspectives, and embrace new values even if it means going against the grain a little. Cognitive and cultural flexibility will be necessary for adapting to the fluid circumstances of the social singularity.

Subscribe now

The foregoing is an excerpt from my book, The Social Singularity.

“When you say you want to create a consent-based society,” she said, “what do you mean?”

I replied that I want all human relationships in that society to be consensual, not compelled. We went round and round for an hour.

I didn’t get very far in persuading her.

To most people—my wife included—the very idea of a society based on consent is a strange abstraction, even though it’s in our Declaration of Independence.

For our entire lives, we have grown up under the authority of a monopoly that, at the end of the day, has power over us. This group of people has the power to tax. It requires us to use debased money. It has the power to kill, and it has done so.

So, if we do not comply, the group can and will compel us.

But the government is not a thing. It’s a group of people, no different from you or me, with a monopoly on the initiation of violence.

It uses the threat of violence to maintain its power to tax, transfer, and erect programs and projects we might despise.

Subscribe now

Voting is a Veneer

Around this tremendous power—including the armed agents, the guns, and the jails to put you in if you don’t comply—there is a veneer of legitimacy. We do a little dance every couple of years called an election.

But depending on where you live, the odds that your vote could decide who shall be the senator in your state are about 1 in a million, which is only slightly better than the odds of getting struck by lightning that year. For the U.S. president, your odds of casting the deciding vote are about 1 in 60 million.

You might as well cry a teardrop in the ocean and expect the tide to turn.

Still, most people can’t imagine things being decided any other way. Power gets transferred and tossed around rather arbitrarily by “democracy.” Otherwise, a massive managerial state rules over us, and it’s even less accountable to us lowly voters.

That’s right: lowly. Not only is voting a flimsy accountability loop, but a third of voters don’t even know what the branches of government are, much less anything about the national debt. (It just hit $40 trillion.)

Most of us aren’t hyper-partisan. We just go about our lives sandwiched between two vocal partisan mobs shouting for us to vote this way or that.

Surely we can do better! But how?

It comes down to overcoming people’s failure of imagination. And that’s nigh impossible when the partisans go around with dumb talking points and bumper-sticker logic, and half the voters with intelligence below the mean.

What then?

Okay, so let’s get back to the idea of a consent-based society.

I remember my wife telling me a story about how she hated her AT&T phone plan and decided to switch to Verizon. She promised never to use AT&T again.

“What if things could be more like that?” I said.

By that point, she was tired. We’d been arguing for an hour.

So I’ll wrap up here with three points I wish I’d said to her. It might help you in conversations like this with your spouse:

1. Consent means you can leave. If Verizon treats you badly, you can go to AT&T; if Publix disappoints you, you can shop at ALDI or Whole Foods. The simplest test of consent is whether you can say no—and leave the system—without being punished. Otherwise, would anybody propose a grocery store monopoly for 340 million people, give it compulsory dues, and call that consumer choice?

2. Competition makes the powerful accountable. Imagine if your phone company could charge whatever it wanted, change the terms whenever it pleased, and send armed men after you if you refused to pay. We would never call it “accountability” if customers got to vote on the CEO every four years.

3. Governance doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all. Different communities could offer different rules, services, and ways of living together—and people could choose among them, just as they choose schools, churches, neighborhoods, insurance plans, or phone companies. Instead of fighting endlessly over who controls the monopoly, we could experiment with ways of breaking it up.

We already understand consent everywhere else: the right to say no, the right to leave, and the right to associate with another organization.

The radical question—the one Thomas Jefferson asked—is why governance should be different.

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

Subscribe now

Liberals have a bad habit of describing their hard-won victories as the natural condition of mankind. They have a Whiggish idea of progress. Once the religious wars burned out, they thought, enlightened Europeans had shown the world that people who disagree about the path to salvation can still share roads and a common polity. And that’s not entirely wrong.

But somewhere along the way, they downplayed the fact of fundamental disagreement. Everyone should be content to reduce all ways of life to preferences, which can simply peacefully coexist with others' preferences. It does seem obvious to those who prefer peace that others would come to see the light. So most liberals just assumed a blanket of reasoned reciprocity in this regard. Otherwise, preferences can be privately traded, individually weighted, or, at least, democratically aggregated.

Process and procedure can handle the rest, liberals insisted with a wave of the hand.

Philosopher Carl Schmitt called liberalism out, and rightly so. Despite his Nazi past, we have to take Schmitt’s ideas seriously—not so much because he welcomed conflict, though he did, but because he believed that a political order that refuses to identify its enemies will eventually be destroyed. That implies that if you fail to know your enemies, you and your way of life risk being vanquished.

Shores of Tripoli

I’m reminded of the liberal Jefferson and Adams, who, while serving as American diplomats, met in London in 1786 with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. They asked why Tripoli claimed the right to wage war on nations that had done it no injury—at a time when Barbary corsairs had preyed on American shipping and enslaved captives. In their joint report to John Jay, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, they recorded the ambassador’s answer:

It was founded on the law of their great Prophet: that it was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their Authority were sinners: that it was their right & duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, & to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; & that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

It turns out that conflict with the Barbary pirates would be America’s first war as a free and independent nation.

How much has changed today?

The Insight That Won’t Go Away

Schmitt’s claim in The Concept of the Political is deceptively narrow. The nature of the political, he argued, differs from that of subjects like economics or aesthetics. The political is fundamentally about disagreement, which involves degrees of intensity. Any disagreement—whether about tariffs, salvation, or pronouns—becomes political when it reaches a pitch where one group is willing to see another group dominated or defeated.

At that level of intensity, the operative relation is friend and enemy.

The enemy in this schema is not necessarily a person you dislike. Schmitt was explicit that private enmity has nothing to do with it. The enemy is the other whose way of life, lived on his terms, is incompatible with yours, on your terms—which presents a conflict no general rule or peaceful process can settle. The reason no rule or process can settle it is that the rule would have to be written by someone, from somewhere—like a neutral Gods-eye perspective.

Neutrality evaporates at the boundary where it matters most, thinks Schmitt.

This is an unavoidable insight liberals must stop trying to talk their way out of. A liberal constitutional order that permits every way of life—including those who seek to abolish that very order—has failed to draw a vital line. Drawing that line is a condition of survival, and it is not negotiable. One can call that line procedural rather than substantive if it makes him feel better, but either way, those on the other side of it experience it as a judgment about who belongs.

Schmitt was right that neutrality is a delusion. Otherwise, a society that refuses to fight for its ground rules will be destroyed by those who despise it. The goal, then, is not some impossible, passive neutrality, but a self-aware, armed pluralism—a liberalism that drops the pretense of neutrality and explicitly draws its battle lines at second-order behavior. (More on this to come.)

Where Schmitt falls short is in treating friend and enemy as a simple, ontological binary. He leaves no room for the most common condition of coexistence: someone who thinks you are deeply, consequentially, even damnably wrong, but who intends to go on living beside you in peace. Schmitt’s schema only registers a fellow citizen or a mortal threat.

But there is a third category.

Three, Not Two

Political theorist Chantal Mouffe addressed this gap decades ago with what she called “agonistic pluralism,” the idea that a pluralist democracy can convert some antagonism into agonism, and some enemies into political adversaries. Her Schmitt-inspired scheme needs one more move to become operational—a third political category with its own definition.

Mouffe addressed this gap decades ago with what she called “agonistic pluralism,” the idea that a pluralist democracy can convert some antagonism into agonism and some enemies into political adversaries. Mouffe argues that democratic politics should transform antagonism between enemies into agonism between adversaries—people “whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question.”

Her crucial insight was that Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction needed another category. We can extract that insight from her democratic theory, even if we aren’t willing to swallow the idea that democracy itself should convert antagonism into agonism.

Instead, we can turn Mouffe’s distinction into a more general tripartite classification, defining each category according to the relationship it permits.

1. A friend shares your substantive commitments. Not all of them, of course, but enough that you can build together without renegotiating first principles every morning. The relation is cooperation, and the currency is solidarity in reciprocity.

2. An enemy is not defined by the depth of a disagreement but by what he’s willing to do about it. The enemy is an actor who seeks to eliminate the possibility of coexistence. He wants to extinguish your way of life—to make the field of play unavailable to you, to close the exits, and to ensure you make no more arguments against him. The relation is resistance, and the means are coercion, exclusion, and domination.
   
   Here’s the third, which disrupts Schmitt’s binary.
   

3. An adversary rejects your substantive commitments but accepts your right to hold them anyway. This is one who thinks your religion is superstition, your economics is theft, and your family arrangements are a mistake. He will argue his case, organize against you, win and lose elections as your adversary, without imposing his worldview on you. The relation is competition, and the means are argumentation, “sweet talk,” and parallel experiments in living.

Note: These categories don’t rank how much you like or dislike people. They are a classification of what a given actor requires of you.

Schmitt's mistake wasn't recognizing the friend/enemy distinction. It was treating the friend-enemy distinction as definitive of the political, leaving no adequate category for profound disagreement among people who nevertheless accept one another's continued existence and freedom to dissent.

Of course, there are shades and grades between each category, which complicates matters. But we must soldier on.

The Membrane that Matters

Once you have three categories, a more decisive political line is no longer the one Schmitt drew. Instead, it falls between adversary and enemy.

This new line-drawing exercise does most of the work. It means that the question a political order puts to its members is not What do you narrowly believe but rather What, given sufficient power, does your overall belief system permit you to do to those who believe otherwise? There is no stopping point to the first question. However precisely you define acceptable belief, a finer distinction can always be drawn, and someone will eventually draw it. (A Leninist is not a Trotskyite. A Wesleyan is not a Presbyterian.) But the second question does stop somewhere. It boils down to a fairly short list of things a person will or will not do toward those who disagree with their way of life, and the list is short enough that people who disagree can still agree on it.

Subscribe now

Karl Popper is usually conscripted into these discussions, albeit poorly. The “paradox of tolerance” is often quoted as if it were a permission slip to suppress opinions one finds obnoxious, which misses what Popper actually wrote. His actual position was far subtler. A free society should tolerate even intolerant ideas so long as they engage in rational debate. Suppression becomes a legitimate duty only when a movement renounces reason itself—teaching its followers to dismiss rational argument as mere "tools that will never dismantle the master’s house," forbidding them from listening to counter-arguments, and answering debate with violence or coercion. The threshold for suppression is reached not when an idea becomes offensive, but when a movement explicitly abandons the realm of persuasion for the realm of force.

Despite the shades and grades, that is a stark behavioral threshold. And the right one.

The trigger can be found more in institutional design and individual conduct than in doctrinal content. Enemy acts are concrete, so they can be enumerated:

1. Deny exit, so people cannot leave your community or your jurisdiction;

2. Deny speech, so dissent can no longer be voiced;

3. Deny association, so alternatives cannot be organized; and

4. Deny political participation, so an organized group is consigned permanently to the margins.

A paradox looms.

Number Four Cannot Be Absolute

An order built within this threshold will end up tolerating people whose first-order beliefs it finds repugnant, but that is no defect. A neighbor who believes I am hellbound, but who would not lift a finger to hasten my descent, is safer than an agnostic willing to assassinate someone for his opinion.

An operating maxim emerges from this reflection:

The word that’s easy to miss here is vigorously. A simple, narrow liberal commitment is not a weak one. The whole point of keeping the perimeter clear and simple is that you can defend it without apology.

This makes for a more muscular liberalism.

Worldview and Meta-Worldview

Everything above operates at the level of orders and movements, but the framework becomes genuinely useful when you apply it at the level of an individual’s life. That requires separating two conjoined ideas.

A worldview is first-order. It’s what is true, what is good, and what is worth pursuing—by your lights. Christianity is a worldview. So are socialism, environmentalism, and Confucianism.

A meta-worldview is second-order. It answers how competing worldviews ought to be treated politically. It is less a belief about the world than a matter of how one stands in relation to what others believe. Pluralism is a meta-worldview.

These vary independently, which is important to acknowledge. Two Catholics with identical creeds can hold opposite meta-worldviews. Two pluralists—i.e., identical meta-worldviews—can be a Catholic and an atheist.

The meta-worldview is the political variable, and it runs along a spectrum.

1. The Naive Pluralist says, My worldview competes alongside yours in peaceful coexistence.

2. The Muscular Pluralist says, My worldview competes alongside yours in coexistence, but only if you are also a Pluralist. (Otherwise, 3 or 4.)

3. The Chauvinist says, My worldview should dominate culturally, though yours may persist in the spaces it leaves.

4. The Hegemonist says, My worldview deserves exclusive political privileges and formal set-asides, while yours should be restricted or punished.

5. The Absolutist says, Your worldview must cease to exist.

Most politics today happens in positions 3 and 4, which is why these two deserve more attention than perhaps they get.

Chauvinism is nearly universal and mostly still compatible with coexistence. Consciously or not, almost everyone prefers that their own priors become the norm, and a culture where some worldview happens to be dominant is not thereby a form of tyranny.

Hegemonism is where we should sound the alarm, because formal privilege is the mechanism by which a temporary majority is tempted to convert itself into a permanent one, or a tyrannical minority launches a violent takeover to move to 5. Call it the paradox of liberalism, but to survive, a pluralist republic must adopt a strictly targeted hegemonism of its own: using the full force of its law to restrict the political participation of any partisan whose second-order goal is the dismantling of the pluralist order itself.

Pluralism cannot extend unlimited legal protection and rights to those who organize to abolish legal protection and rights. In any case, between chauvinistic ambition and hegemonic architecture lies the boundary that most institutional struggles are really about.

Universalism Reconsidered

Cross the meta-worldview against a second axis, that is, the intended scope of the worldview’s expansion, and you get four types that are worth identifying because they are far too often confused.

Particularism plus pluralism gives you a pluralist tribe. Our worldview is right for us, though some may differ slightly, and this is not an emergency. Orthodox communities that maintain intense internal discipline—but have no ambitions to force conversion or threaten ostracism—are a pluralistic tribe.

Particularism plus monism gives you the closed tribe. Our way is ours. Outsiders are a contaminant, and insiders must conform. This posture is defensive rather than expansionist, though it can become brittle under pressure and treats defection as betrayal.

Universalism plus pluralism gives you the evangelical pluralist. Everyone ought to share our pluralism, and everyone should come to it freely. A missionary who accepts the door being shut in his face, the abolitionist who argues in the public square, or the philanthropist who buys advertisements might all qualify.

Universalism plus monism gives you the imperialist. Everyone will eventually live according to our worldview, and the means by which they arrive is not the point.

Set the four side by side, and the conventional worry collapses. It is not universalism that generates the danger. Islam and Marxism hold worldviews of identical scope, as an imam and a commissar want the map colored green or red, respectively. What separates them is the second-order question: What will they do to the people who refuse? An imam who accepts refusal and a commissar who does not both harbor ambitions for their creeds. What distinguishes them is whether they seek consent or demand submission.

That is why “extremism” can be a clumsy term. It tends to measure distance from the median in terms of one’s substantive first-order commitments, which tells you almost nothing about whether someone is willing to let you live or keep your way of life. For now, we must pass over the problem of whether a given person is willing to lie.

The Aperture of Pluralism

Everyone carries what we might call an aperture of pluralism. It signifies the degree of worldview difference one can absorb before one ceases to classify someone as an adversary and starts to classify him as an enemy. A wide aperture means one can tolerate a great deal of disagreement as part of ordinary politics. A narrow aperture means one receives the same disagreement as a threat to one's way of life.

The aperture is not a fixed personal trait. It contracts under perceived threat, and it contracts quickly. This mechanism is worth observing because it can be exploited in either direction.

For example, “Queers for Palestine” tolerate mass migration of immigrants committed both to a substantive commitment to Islam—which forbids homosexuality (worldview)—and to the imperial project of Sharia Law, under whose rule homosexuals are to be executed (meta-worldview). Members of the Red-Green-Black axis are happy to exploit “Queers for Palestine” until their allyship is no longer needed.

By contrast, a politician with a narrow aperture might, after some single sensational event—such as the murder of a citizen by an immigrant—seek to shut down all migration and deport all non-citizens, full stop. This exploits the sensational event that disturbs others temporarily so they narrow their aperture in xenophobia.

Another big problem is an enemy spiral. Group A, under political pressure, narrows its aperture and reclassifies Group B from adversary to enemy. Group B, correctly observing that it is now being treated as an enemy, narrows its aperture in turn. Each contraction is a rational response to the last. Nobody has to lie or be wrong about the facts for the spiral to run. In the end, two populations that might have shared a country hold a mutual enmity and suspicion that neither invented.

Enemy spirals can be manufactured, which makes them dangerous. An actor stoking mutual enmity need not persuade anyone of anything. They need only supply each side with evidence that the other’s aperture has narrowed.

Provocation is cheap, especially in the digital age.

The Ratcheting Sovereign

Which brings us to an objection Schmitt would raise against this whole exercise, and he would be correct to raise it.

Deciding who counts as an enemy is one of the greatest powers in politics. Schmitt knew this. It is why he located decision-making power, “sovereignty,” among leaders who exploit the exceptional cases rather than in, say, legislatures drafting and passing ordinary laws. The moment one builds a political framework that licenses exclusion and coercion against enemies, he has created an office worth capturing. And someone will capture it. But the sovereign will stretch the category of enemy. He’ll apply it first against a genuinely dangerous enemy, setting the precedent. Then, he’ll stretch it against mere adversaries, which was the point all along.

His sovereignty expands beyond reasonable bounds.

There is no clever formulation that dissolves this problem. Only design constraints raise the cost of leveraging exceptions and making enemies.

It would be nice if the enemy designation could therefore be more decentralized, so that no single institution could hold the power to classify a group as such, making institutional capture more decisive. Making enemies must be constrained by procedure—slow, evidentiary, and subject to an appeals process—so that the classification tracks conduct that can be demonstrated rather than merely alleged. In short, it ought to be hard to invoke and easy to revoke, because the relative asymmetry between those two costs is what keeps the sovereign from ratcheting. And everyone operating must admit the failure, since every actor correctly classified as an enemy represents a failure of coexistence—whether international or domestic.

However, Schmitt argues that the sovereign arises in the exceptional case. Whether Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, or every president since Truman has used U.S. military force abroad without a formal declaration of war by Congress.

Note also what I don’t claim with this framework.

The pluralist meta-worldview is not a neutral point of view. I, too, am committed to a specific second-order outlook. To the absolutist, then, I look like his mirror image: an enemy with a preferred outcome and the will to enforce it. Does that make me an illiberal liberal? Perhaps. Schmitt’s point about the impossibility of neutrality survives, though. An honest response is not to deny the perspective but to restrict it.

That way a liberal can state exactly what he is willing to defend and exactly what he is not. One must then accept that such defense is itself a political act rather than some form of ideological gnosticism, even if my goal is eventually to transcend politics, for example, in its current American form.

The Deeper Question

Political philosophy in its consensus-seeking mode keeps asking what has never been answered sustainably at scale: What do we believe together? Every serious attempt at an answer has required either conformity that no large society can maintain or coercion that manufactures the appearance of such conformity.

Best to ask a different question then.

The answer has to be simple and clear enough that peaceful people with genuinely incompatible notions of the good life can all sign on, and substantial enough that signing means something to the signatories. Somewhere between those two constraints sits the constitution of a liberal order that has any hope of lasting.

Subscribe now

My current Number One is Javier Milei of Argentina.

In 1913, an Argentine bricklayer earned more than a French one. Buenos Aires had electric trams before most of Europe. The phrase “rich as an Argentine” was something people said in Paris back then.

Then Argentina spent 70 years proving you can, in fact, unmake a rich country—deliberately, democratically, and with popular enthusiasm.

They had turned to democratic socialism.

But in December 2023, a TV economist with unmanageable hair walked into the Casa Rosada holding a chainsaw.

Paying to be Poor

Here’s the thing about Argentina’s decline that makes it an object lesson for us: nobody invaded. There was no plague, no partition, nor any resource curse. Argentina had the grain, the cattle, the ports, and the schools. And entrepreneurs made the best of it.

What got introduced was Peronism. (Take note here, because this matters to the current Zeitgeist.)

Peronism wasn’t revolutionary. There were no gulags. They held elections. What Peronists did in power was subordinate the entire productive ecosystem of a nation to the political need to distribute favors. Price controls to make voters feel richer, tariffs to make a factory owner loyal, subsidies to make a union quiet, and a printing press to pay the tab.

Tax. Inflate. Transfer. Print money to buy constituency groups, then blame the consequences on “oligarchs” and “neoliberals.” Sound familiar? Repeat this for seventy years.

What nobody wants to admit is that Peronism is just Democratic Socialism.

And, as it always does, the bill came due. Since the rise of Peronism in the 1940s, Argentina has repeatedly defaulted. Currency devaluations were so routine that Argentines learned to think in dollars and treat the peso like a hot potato. By late 2023, inflation was running north of 200% a year, their central bank reserves were gone, and poverty rose above 40% in a country that used to feed the world.

The Knowledge Problem

So Javier Milei arrives on the scene. And the strange thing about Milei—the thing the international press could never quite digest—is that he didn’t just campaign on rock and roll and chainsaws. He campaigned on Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.

The Austrian School's economic argument is established, simple, and almost no one in power has ever paid any attention to it.

Hayek’s version goes like this: the knowledge a society runs on doesn’t exist in a committee or in the wisdom of a commissar. It is scattered across millions of people—what the guy in Rosario knows about his soil, what the shopkeeper in Córdoba knows about her customers this week. Prices are how that knowledge travels: information wrapped in an incentive. Freeze prices like Mamdani freezes rents, and you haven’t protected anyone. You’ve cut the accountability loop.

Planners aren’t evil; it’s just that the information they’d need can never be centralized.

From that insight, Milei insists on three commitments: Let prices tell the truth. Make property and contract ensure that people will build things that outlast an election cycle. And shrink the state, because deficits financed by the printing press are not a policy so much as slow suicide—a tax on everyone too poor to hold dollars.

Milei’s innovation wasn’t the theory. The theory has been sitting there since the 1920s, when Mises articulated the socialist calculation problem. Milei’s innovation was transitioning all at once, publicly—in a democracy—while telling voters it would hurt before it got better.

Subscribe now

What Milei Did

Milei closed Ministries. Cut subsidies. And scrapped price controls. And the rent-control regime—the one that had stripped Buenos Aires of apartments—was repealed outright.

Then the numbers started to move. Five indicators, before and after…

First: Inflation. In December 2023, prices rose twenty-five and a half percent in one single month. But by mid-2026, monthly prints had fallen below two percent. Annual inflation plummeted from 211 percent down to 33. That is the difference between a country where restaurants reprint menus weekly and one where a family can actually plan a year ahead. Capital controls were removed, rental listings flooded back into Buenos Aires, and real rents DROPPED—which is EXACTLY what every housing economist predicted, and what no democratic socialist anywhere wants to hear.

Second—and this is the fuel behind the first—the Budget. Argentina ran a deficit of around three percent of GDP in 2023. After Milei, Argentina saw a primary surplus of 1.8 percent in 2024, followed by 1.4 percent in 2025.

That’s right: Back-to-back surpluses—the first time that’s happened since 2008—and Milei’s government is on pace for a trifecta. And get this: The central bank stopped printing money because it no longer needed to fund the deficit.

Third: Poverty. Official figures show poverty peaked at nearly 53 percent during the initial shock and now sits at 28 percent, with extreme poverty dropping from 18 percent down to 6. And that’s breathtaking if true.

Now, let’s look at two asterisks:

A) Market reforms hurt at first. That 53 percent peak happened under Milei due to his adjustments. And real people lost real jobs getting from there to here. But the pain was short-lived.

B) The poverty figures are the most contested of the set. Researchers argue that the household survey’s rising reports of non-employment income flatter the trend. A twenty-five-point move is hard to deny, but Milei’s critics at least deserve a hearing.

Now, when you consider the man hasn’t even been in office for three years, these results are stunning.

Fourth: Country Risk. This is the number almost nobody cites, and it might be the most revealing. It’s the premium the world charges Argentina to borrow money. In 2023, it ran north of 2000 basis points. Today, it’s around 600—a two-thirds collapse. Notice what that number is NOT: it ain’t produced by government statistics agencies, a minister, or a press office massage artist. Strangers with money, on aggregate, have decided Argentina is far less likely to default. You can’t spin a bond spread. It is the least sentimental opinion poll on Earth. And it made a big move in the right direction.

Fifth: Production. Now, go stand out in Patagonia. Vaca Muerta shale output is up over 30 percent year-on-year, pushing national oil production past 840,000 barrels a day. That’s a record. A country that used to import energy now exports it, swinging the current account to a multi-billion-dollar surplus and driving GDP growth to 4.4 percent.

Why It Matters

Look, I’m not here to canonize Javier Milei. He’s a mid-term politician, and history is unkind to people who declare victory too early.

What I care about is what his reforms are PROVING. Because the argument we always seem to be having—the one about free markets vs state intervention—usually happens in the subjunctive. Everyone gets to keep their ideological priors forever because nobody ever wants to admit the tests have been run (See 70s Sweden and 80s New Zealand).

But when it comes to democratic socialism, Argentina ran the experiment, and ran it long and hard. It wasn’t a city-state, island, or a special economic zone. Argentina is a large, indebted, deeply politicized country with a seventy-year debt-spending habit and a population that had every reason to turn their backs on Peronism.

Two lessons come out of Argentina’s test:

The first is that Argentina’s version of democratic socialism—Peronism—failed because the system ate itself. Promise more than the economy brings in, cover the shortfall with printed money, and that money devours the wages of the people you swore to protect. Inflation is the most regressive tax ever invented.

The second is that such failure is reversible and is quickly being reversed. That’s what I hope you’ll hold onto. 70 years of accumulated damage began to unwind in two and a half years—not because anyone found a clever new lever, but because someone stopped pulling the old socialist ones.

The knowledge and energy were already there—distributed among the people—in their heads, hands, and productive capabilities. It didn’t need to be granted. It needed to be unleashed.

From the Rooftops

So: shout out it! Peronism was the warning. It’s too easy to vote your way into ruin, slowly, sincerely, with a credulous majority behind you.

Javier Milei is living proof that the alternative exists. Reform is rough, but the pain is quick, and the results are impressive. Freedom works. Entrepreneurship works. While the US, mired in debt, is running toward democratic socialism—they’re running away from it in Latin America.

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

Subscribe now

A special kind of person walks among us. Under the right institutional conditions, she is capable of assembling people and resources to serve others sustainably. If she fails to serve others—say, if enough of them are unhappy with the product or service she offers—she will be unable to continue her efforts. So, her efforts come with great risk, and some risks have clear odds.

Hers? Not so much.

An insurer will price the chance that her business burns down because businesses have burned down before. Yet no one will sell her a policy against her failure to serve others well. She must muster the resources, hire the help, and place her bet—but she can play no hand with known odds. She must guess what people will want before they know they want it, and pay in advance for the chance to be right.

She not only risks resources, whether her own or another’s, but she often risks mutually beneficial relationships that could dissolve. She is responsible for closing what we have called an “accountability loop,” and she must do so repeatedly. Her failure to close the accountability loop rests squarely on her shoulders.

How does she improve her chances of sustaining and growing this assemblage of people and resources? First, she must try to become attuned to others’ wants and needs, many of which they cannot articulate and some of which they will not recognize until she has met them. Then, she must collaborate with people willing to help her meet those needs.

When she is successful, those she serves will reward her, and she will reward those helping her.

Profit is Measurement

Notice what that reward tells her. She purchased various inputs and helper hours. Each of those had other competing claimants. If what she sells brings in more than what she paid to put it all together, she has taken things people valued at one price and transformed them into something people value more. The surplus is not a prize for good behavior. It is a measurement. Loss reads her performance in the other direction. It tells her she has consumed more than she has created and that she should change direction or discontinue, so the inputs and labor hours can be passed on to someone who will make more out of them.

Those she asks to help her do not share in the risks she takes. They get paid whether the venture succeeds or not. She gets paid last, if anything is left. That’s not “exploitation,” it’s exchange. Those who bear no risk trade the uncertain upside for a wage or salary paid on a specific day. She swaps that known day for a claim on whatever remains. And if those who collaborate with her share in the risks, then they can and should share in some of the decision-making authority and the rewards. It is right that those who take the greatest risks enjoy the greatest share of rewards for serving others sustainably, and right that they have the greatest latitude to ensure success.

Subscribe now

The Interlopers

She, the entrepreneur, also has to serve others sustainably despite the presence of interlopers. Some interlopers tell her how she has to serve others and punish her if she fails to serve them their way. Other interlopers take a portion of her rewards for things that mean nothing to her enterprise and do not align with her values.

She would choose some of the rules herself, of course. She wants courts that enforce her contracts and laws that punish fraud, because her whole arrangement depends on strangers being able to rely on one another. But there is a point beyond which the interlopers make her efforts too risky or too difficult to undertake. These interlopers have almost never assembled people and resources or taken their own risks to start a venture.

It isn’t just that interlopers take a cut to provide for things irrelevant to her enterprise. It’s that they tend to be her perverse mirror image. Reward without risk. Authority without accountability. They make a claim on the upside but are immune from the downside.

The interlopers do not function in tight accountability loops.

Punishing the Productive

We live in a system where the better she serves others’ wants and needs, the more she is rewarded. If this were the end of it, though, more people might take the risks to serve others successfully and make us all better off. Strangely, though, the more she gets rewarded, the more the interlopers punish her success by taking more of her rewards. Behind the interlopers are people who don’t understand just how hard it is for her to create sustainable value for those she serves, how much risk is involved, and what sort of prosocial ecosystem develops around her efforts.

Some see her success and either envy her or become indignant.

They see unmet wants and needs elsewhere in society and decide that she is responsible for meeting those unmet wants and needs, too—but she ought to be rewarded less for doing so. Many of those who think she doesn’t meet enough unmet needs with her enterprise do not think they should have to help her meet anyone’s unmet needs. They feel entitled to share in the rewards simply for having been educated and designated as an elite. They learn to live a parasitic life, which they justify in the name of social justice.

Yet those who cry out most vociferously for social justice do not sustainably serve others’ wants and needs. They agitate. They expect. These agitators insist that the interlopers take more of the rewards freely given by those whose wants and needs were met. But they do not, themselves, create value. Too few of the agitators give of themselves to assist those in distress or who must live at the margins. Simply holding the belief that the entrepreneur ought to help meet all society’s unmet needs gives the agitator a special status—at least in his own mind.

It is enough for the agitator to say what is good, not to be good.

Costs We Cannot Count

So far, most of this has been about her ability to serve others well or not, including her risk, her reward, her difficulties, and, of course, her feedback loop to close. But she is not the one the interlopers cost society the most.

That was the one who would have done it better: whether at a lower price, at higher quality, or at hours that suited more people’s schedules. This would-be competitor looked at what the interlopers required, ran the numbers, and decided it wasn’t worth it.

There is no record of this would-be competitor. We measure no closed storefronts, no bankruptcy filings, and no laid-off staff. The product she would have created is not missing from store shelves, because the shelves were never built. The interlopers removed the possibility that her venture would come into existence—as a ghost venture.

Yet the interloper—who has never assembled anything—can point to the entrepreneurs still standing and claim it is proof that their interventions do no harm. They either cannot or will not imagine the unseen costs to society.

Let us not forget that special people walk among us. If we are to continue to enjoy a flourishing society, it is important to consider how we can make it easier for her to create customer value and hire the help to do so—even if she becomes wildly successful and receives big rewards. She is, after all, a steward in an ecosystem of value. If we create a system where her efforts are no longer welcome—whether by replacing her with more bureaucrats or functionaries or by punishing her success—we will find ourselves in a state of civilizational decline.

Subscribe now

Here’s what you won’t find: extra canceled checks at the US Treasury.

The federal government accepts voluntary donations and has done so for over a century. That means billionaires can pay more any time they want.

But virtually none of them does.

Economists have a name for this gap between words and deeds. They call it revealed preference. The idea is simple: what you actually do reveals what you actually want. Everything else is noise.

We already know this. Our grandmothers used to say, “Actions speak louder than words.” Which brings us to a vital lesson:

Wait, that’s the easy part. What’s harder is:

Doing Good

Most of Western ethics is about thinking and talking. Trolley problems. Categorical imperatives. We’re meant to sit in an armchair and reason our way to the right and the good, and somehow we fancy ourselves as moral by having correct moral opinions.

But nobody becomes a musician by having opinions about music. Nobody learns to defend himself by commenting on combat. You have to practice. Whether in music or martial arts, you stink at first, then you stink a little less, and a little less still until you get proficient.

Virtue works the same way.

It’s not a conclusion you reach after stacking premises. It’s what you do, over and over, until it becomes who you are.

Subscribe now

Practice over Politics

Now, too many people have forgotten this. So, what happens when we forget? What happens when we fail to practice integrity? Nonviolence? Or compassion? Too many people turn to politics.

Yet politics is just war by other means. And war runs on the logic of domination: If the other side doesn’t vote right, think right, or act right, we’ll force them to when we win the next election. That’s the rationale, at least, and it’s messed up. Sure, ballots are better than bullets, but that’s about all democracy has going for it. Otherwise, we get a lot of activism.

Yet activism is empty. It’s just agitation and outsourcing. Some team has decided how everyone else should live, shipping your values off to some distant capital. The project is to force everyone else to obey so that we all live by the One True Way.

That’s projection, not practice.

The opposite of activism is virtue. And virtue requires insourcing—assuming personal responsibility and then collaboration. Start with the one person whose behavior you actually control, and do something other people can feel.

Now. One approach invites enemies. The other invites collaborators. You can tell which mindset you’re in by asking yourself a single question: Am I hellbent on changing others, or am I trying to be the change?

The World Needs Repair

The old rabbis had a word for the second path. Tikkun. It means repairing what’s broken. The point of tikkun isn’t to win or to dominate. Instead, we set about mending things—ourselves first, then the world around us—bit by bit in whom we help, what we do, and what we leave behind. Repair lies in the harmonization of difference.

The old rabbis taught that the cosmos was shattered into different shards. But each of us preserves a divine spark, and we are tasked with putting together the shards. The goal is not to create a perfect whole, but instead to bring diversity and unity into balance.

Even if the old rabbis were just making myths, living a life of tikkun creates meaning and, hopefully, leaves the world better than we found it.

Making Waves

Here’s something we shouldn’t forget.

Our human default is mimicry. We copy each other unconsciously, whether we want to admit it or not. That means our habits are contagious. But then again, so are our excuses, our complaints, and our victim complexes. That means we have to stay sensitive—both to what we are mimicking in others, and what people might mimic in us.

The change you want to see isn’t something you argue people into. It’s something you become. Others will experience your being and becoming like ripples on the surface of a pond. When you practice virtue, those around you are more likely to practice virtue, too.

So, be the person worth copying. Create waves that others can feel. And be sure to copy the wise and virtuous.

Eventually, we’ll do it together.

Because the more we become the change we want to see, the better the world will get.

Subscribe now

It’s called the Fourth Political Theory (4PT for short). It’s gotten the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin two major fans among throngs of minor ones. The first is Vladimir Putin. The second is Tucker Carlson. Each, in his own way, is important. But together, the three make for a subversive head-heart-gut triad: Dugin the thinker, Carlson the relator, and Putin the muscle.

Much like the social justice left with its beachhead in the academy, these three are propagating their own form of ideological imperialism online. But don’t call it right-wing. Like most positions these days, 4PT defies a linear spectrum, despite the parrots of the progressive media calling him “far-right.” Instead, Dugin searches through the ruins of history to put together pieces of something new.

In what follows, I’ll react to quotations from Dugin, presented as pull quotes in italics. (I have taken the liberty of making minor readability edits to the translation.)

The Ideology

I have grown more fond of dialectical thinking in recent years, but I have also learned that dialectics, like any other tool or mode of thinking, is easily abused. So, a lot of the twentieth-century Eurotrash political philosophies have been lazy or dark applications of Hegel’s method.

Dugin’s 4PT appears to be just that—a hodgepodge of pieces he likes from the past. So, there’s little novelty in Dugin’s thought.

The 4PT explicitly positions itself as beyond the three main ideologies of modernity—liberalism (the “first,” which triumphed), communism (the “second,” which failed utterly), and fascism/national socialism (the “third,” which is just so much dark dialectics). 4PT is purportedly not so much a finished theory or closed system, but instead an open “invitation to the development of the fourth political theory, opposite communism, fascism, and liberalism,” writes Dugin.

But can it be the “opposite” of these? Or is it just a selective concatenation of at least two? It appears Dugin’s open invitation is to color within the lines he’s already drawn, with a little Russian Orthodoxy sprinkled in for good measure.

The Subject

Instead of the individual (liberalism), class (communism), or race/nation/state (fascism), the 4PT proposes Dasein as the fundamental subject—a category that is both phenomenological and ontological. It is also closely tied to the “people” (das Volk?) understood existentially as a cultural-historical community that includes past generations, the living, and the unborn. I guess this is how Dugin gets away with appealing to the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (a Western European (Nazi) who studied under a German Jew), while claiming to break free from Western European thinking.

The people and their cultural consciousness are most decidedly tied to place and rooted in history. “In the people, previous generations, the dead, and the future, i.e., the unborn, are present,” writes Dugin. “The people become an absolute category.” Whatever forces make up the Dasein of a people is interesting as far as it goes, but it’s not clear how these forces justify the imposition of a distinct political order, whether in Russia, Richmond, or Rabat. Perhaps cultural Dasein helps to justify a right of self-determination, but that seems like too liberal a notion for the 4PT.

Again, there is little new here. One can see how America’s National Conservatism is redolent of the 4PT. Both blame liberalism for what each considers excessive pluralism, Western decadence, or the perceived subjugation of WASPs, Papists, and Orthodox Christians alike. Both NatCons and Dugin invoke premodern faith traditions and cultural conservatism to justify seizing what they imagine is their rightful place at the highest echelons of political authority.

4PT is backward looking.

Like socialism and fascism, 4PT is hostile to competing doctrines. Liberalism is, of course, the only doctrine capable of making room for various conceptions of the good, with the only caveat being that those who hold those doctrines do so peacefully and within the bounds of a coherent pluralism.

That’s why 4PT is primarily illiberal and anti-liberal, despite its supposed hostility to communism and fascism—and despite its commitment to “multipolarity.” And if one were to find any feature of liberalism in the 4PT synthesis, it must be a feature that’s preselected, integrated, and Christ-haunted. It must not stink of either the Enlightenment or entrepreneurial markets.

Subscribe now

National Bolshevism + Pre-Modernity

The 4PT begins at the intersection of revised anti-liberal traditions. National Bolshevism, despite 4PT being purportedly at odds with fascism, embraces its nationalism and its statism. Bolshevism is, of course, a revolutionary socialist political doctrine and movement led by Vladimir Lenin in early 20th-century Russia. Lenin adapted classical Marxism to Russia's specific political and economic conditions, ultimately laying the ideological and organizational foundation for the Soviet Union.

4PT is meant to be opposed to Marxism and fascism, yet clearly borrows from each. It goes further by drawing on pre-modern sources—tradition, theology, hierarchy, Platonic ideals, medieval society, and religious visions—while rejecting what Dugin considers the modernist flaws of prior ideologies. The Church, again, provides justification for the centralization of state power, not to mention the bureaucratic hierarchy that branches down from the authority.

Church and State reunited. But why?

Dugin believes that tradition and theology were “overthrown with the dawn of modernity.” Yet the US managed to preserve religious tradition and theology way better than Russia did.

Still, Dugin doesn’t like religious pluralism. Unlike the theological justifications for individual rights espoused by liberals such as John Locke, 4PT offers a theological justification for the state—ironically, as the Czars and the Church did (not to mention the Western European monarchies, with their ongoing religious wars and power projections).

One wonders if Dugin is motivated by an old Soviet-era enmity, and the generalized thymos of a Russian who fancies that there would have been no Soviet collapse had the Bolsheviks not discarded Russian Orthodoxy early on. If so, one can only conclude that Dugin is motivated by the indignity of loss. If only the Kremlin had baptised its Bolshevism, the socialist project might have succeeded.

The Principles

The foe, of course, is liberalism—and its globalist avatar, the United States. The three pillars above form the positive content, or foundation, of the 4PT.

If life under Soviet communism wasn’t a kind of dark age, 4PT will surely usher in one. This time around, hungry people in the bread lines will be encouraged to pray. And the “people” will be brought up within narrower theological constraints to put God and country over commerce and plutocratic oligarchy.

Similar to the Red-Green (Marxist-Muslim) alliance taking shape on the Western left, 4PT imagines a Red-Gold synthesis.

Against Liberal Hegemony

The 4PT wages war on the current post-liberal order—postmodernity, post-industrial society, realized liberal thought, globalism, and the “society of the spectacle”—while advocating a multipolar world of diverse civilizations, each with its own values and “Logos.”

I’m reminded of the National Conservatives again, especially in their confused efforts to lump Enlightenment liberalism with progressive leftism, postmodernism, and globalism. While it can be argued that America after World War II became something of an imperial global constable—and American progressives had always been eager to erect a world government through supranational institutions like the UN—such a thing is a far cry from liberalism rightly construed. Dugin and the NatCons would do well to steelman liberalism.

Liberalism as a doctrine is compatible with multipolarity to the extent that illiberal countries are capable of reining in their expansionist ambitions. This applies to the United States as much as to China or any New Duginite Russia.

Yet international game theory is a bitch.

Authentic Politics and a Pre-Modern/Postmodern Synthesis

To complicate matters, the 4PT emphasizes some authentic existence (vs. “alienation”) and a paradoxical synthesis borrowing postmodern tools and the critique of modernity while recovering pre-modern sacredness and myth.

Ironically, then, the 4PT conjures the most utopian aspects of Marxism, which Marx abandoned to make communism more 'scientific.' When you really break it down, the 4PT should be called the 2.5PT+ROC (Russian Orthodox Christianity). I’m simply not buying that a philosophy combining Marxism with Christo-fascism is meant to oppose political philosophies 2 and 3.

The American 4PT

I’ll pass over how much Tucker Carlson and Aleksandr Dugin sound like the Queers for Palestine when it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict. At least we know who will pay the jizya if Russia or America is overtaken by the Islamic hordes. But it’s becoming clearer by the day that Carlson has taken enough inspiration from Dugin and the NatCons to propagate a new anti-Americanism, which, rumor has it, Carlson hopes to organize more formally.

Despite all the references to Heidegger, the 4PT could have been more easily defined as anti-Randian Objectivism—equal and opposite in its adolescence. By the day, it seems as if Tucker Carlson is trying to become the tip of the spear for a distinctly American 4PT.

But Tucker Carlson is no philosopher. He’s an intellectual sockpuppet. And if he imagines he holds onto anything close to what we might call a principle, it’s America First. But that’s just a label he wraps around military non-interventionism, which he shares with Dugin and, indeed, many liberals. The rest is imported Eurotrash socialism, thrice-dunked in holy water—plus a dangerous toleration for Islamists as both seek allies among the hijabis and jihadis.

If nothing else, Dugin claims that liberalism contributes to the idea of self-determination and multipolarity, but he thinks liberalism has been far too central on the world stage. Yet liberalism is the only doctrine that can hold people with traditionalist and communitarian sympathies together in peace, so long as their doctrines are practiced locally and in their own anti-imperial niches. Because illiberal philosophies almost put intolerance at their centers, and the best 4PT can do is put competitor doctrines outside national boundaries.

Thus, both the American and Russian versions of 4PT are a Frankenstein monster of illiberal doctrines. And even if they make a couple of good points about the problems of American Hegemony from time to time, we must not let Dugin, Carlson, and Putin infect the American Project with so many bad ideas pulled from the ruins of history.

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

The Penny Drops

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

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

It goes like this:

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

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

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

Few large, many small.

Pattern of Patterns

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

Few large, many small.

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

Again: Few large, many small.

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

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

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

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

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

More Than a Pretty Picture

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

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

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

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

The Invisible Hand That Shapes

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

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

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

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

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

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

All failed.

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

The Taoist in the Lab

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

Resistance blocks growth. Accommodation is life.

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

But I want to do something risky with Exodus.

Subscribe now

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

1. Captivity—Our people are not free.

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

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

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

5. Wilderness—Our newfound freedom is tested.

6. Covenant—Our freedom becomes ordered.

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

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

Be warned, though.

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

The experts were the problem.

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

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

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

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

Those purporting to help are making us worse off.

Bad Therapy

Start with therapy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Therapeutic State

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Mommy and Daddy Parties

So who runs the Iatrogenic State?

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

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

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

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

Now translate all this to politics.

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

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

And We the People?

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

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

All of which brings us to a warning.

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

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

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

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

The Mirage

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

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

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

Sorry. There is no salvation on a ballot.

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

The Agentic Society

So what replaces the Iatrogenic State?

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

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

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

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

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

Still, atrophy is not amputation.

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

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

So, what does that mean to you and me?

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

Memes

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

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

Are these good?

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

Subscribe now

Models

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are these good?

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

Metaphors

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

The philosopher Max Black wrote,

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

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

These are common. But are they good?

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

How does it feel?

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

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

That leaves us with two tasks.

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

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

The first informs. The second recruits.

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

So let’s make this a little more concrete.

One Big Example

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

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

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

Now, run Bitcoin through the subversive innovation formula…

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

The Ecosystem

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

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

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

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

The Dark Twin

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

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

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

Betting on the Bees

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

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

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

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

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

Swarm Order

So here’s the charge.

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

Not us.

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

When you support Underthrow, you’re helping us:

• Produce more podcasts and posts.

• Develop practical blueprints for parallel institutions.

• Launch real-world experiments, such as the Constitution of Consent Contest.

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

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

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

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

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

Free subscribers prove the concept. Paid subscribers boost the signal.

The more support we have, the more we can do:

• Events,

• Contests,

• Institutional prototypes,

• Collaborations,

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

Novel insights. Reduced friction. Higher agency.

UPGRADE to COUNTERPOWER

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

A few dollars a month funds the infrastructure of Underthrow: more podcasts connecting theory to praxis, deeper research on accountability and membranics, more parables and proposals that seed real experiments.

Small, consistent yeses to our articulation of parallel systems today become a flood of viable alternatives tomorrow.

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

The tide is turning.
Surface waves make splashy headlines.
Deep currents change the world.

UPGRADE to COUNTERPOWER

Thank you for sticking with us—free or paid.

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

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

No, that’d be Marxism.

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

The Central Claim

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

Eight Failures of Marxism

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

1. The Labor Theory of Value

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

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

2. Alienation

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

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

3. Exploitation

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

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

4. Abolition of Private Property

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

5. Abolition of Market Prices

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

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

6. Historical Materialism

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

7. Dictatorship of the Proletariat

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

8. Human Nature

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

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

Evolution Over Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here, Baker opens a recent Psychology Today post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on this later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, says Baker,

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

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

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

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

So much for sharing the basis of her claims.

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

Are we getting our money’s worth yet?

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

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

But wait, there’s more….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

That’s a feedback loop.

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

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

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

So here’s my thesis:

The Declaration

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

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

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

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

The Unaccountable Class

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

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

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

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

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

Anatomy of a Loop

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

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

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

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

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

The Simplest Loop

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

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

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

Renewal

Okay, so here’s the punchline:

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

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

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

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

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

Because remember:

I’m Max Borders.

Let’s criticize by creating.

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

A Shared Premise

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

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

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

Subscribe now

The Gnostic Anarchist

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

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

The Directional Anarchist

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

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

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

Sadly, most libertarian anarchists are gnostics.

I’d Like to Meet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only one of them is actually moving any earth.

Subscribe now

His name was Sir John Bagot Glubb.

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

Glubb saw the pattern.

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

So, what should be done?

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

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

Or just read their platform.

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

Others like them answer.

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

Then the world notices.

And the world starts moving in, arriving on boats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fast forward.

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

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

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

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

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

And the Cooperators?

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

Apparently not.

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

They never did.

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

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

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

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

So what about now? What about the West?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now